To understand more about what assistive technology students have access to, check the AT4All toolkit.
This guide will talk staff through how to create accessible social media posts and videos using Hootesuite, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and X. Firstly, our main aim for making social media content accessible is to ensure that all our stakeholders can make use of what we post. The second reason is that we need to conform to the EU Web Accessibility Directive.
This directive states that public funded bodies like universities must strive to make all new online content accessible. It concerns anything that we host online, from social media, to ebooks, to content in our OER, Arrow.
When designing social media posts, one good consideration to have is who will be interacting with them, and where. Students often engage with social media in areas that are busy and noisy, or areas that need quiet. Ideally, we need our media to be able to work in both of those situations.
Increasing our accessibility through use of, for example, alt text for images and subtitles for videos adds to the metadata in our posts, and thus adds to their findability. It also enables our students to engage with the posts no matter where they are.
This guide will talk you through give step by step "How To" instructions for all of the social media sites we use.
Alt Text: Manually produced metadata that tells a screenreader what is in an image
Audio Description: verbal description of what is happening on screen. Not currently possible with most social media sites, due to the limit of one audio file per video. Narrate the video instead.
Closed Captions: Captions that can be turned on or off by the user. These are recognized by screenreaders too.
Google Lens: Camera icon on the Google Home page. Can be used to search for images, and highlight/ copy text from text heavy images.
Image description: Written description of what you see in an image.
Open captions: Captions that are always on. This should only be used if there are no other options. This is also the only option on the likes of Instagram.
Screenreader: Technology that can read information off of screens. A free example is NVDA
.SRT file: SubRip subtitle file. A type of subtitle file, not quite as reliable as .VTT files as cannot contain metadata
Subtitles: can refer to either closed captioning or open captioning.
Stream/ ScreenPal: Two video creation softwares that we have access to.
Transcript: a text file of what is said in a video.
.VTT file: Video Text Tracks file. More descriptive than .SRT, with ability to contain metadata.
WCAG: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
