Below are a few tips to help you ensure that your social media posts are accessible to everyone. For more detailed guidance, visit DigitalGov's social media accessibility toolkit.
- Make sure your profile page includes alternative contact options, like an accessible "contact us" form or toll-free phone number, or an email link to somebody who can assist people with questions.
- Write social media posts informally and in plain language. Avoid abbreviations and spell out acronyms.
- Use @mentions to tag other organizations on social media and use relevant hashtags on key words and phrases to categorize posts.
- For multi-word hashtags, capitalize the first letters of each section of a compound word (#LikeThisExample).
- Provide closed captioning for YouTube videos. YouTube includes an option for automatic captions, though you’ll want to review and edit them manually before publishing, as the quality is not yet reliable. Alternately, you can upload a transcript or transcribe the captions manually.
- Add captions to Facebook video posts. Make sure captions are turned on for live videos. Link to pages with full captions or transcripts of photos, videos, or audio.
- Avoid using emojis, or at least refrain from using excessive emojis in posts.
- Turn on image description settings in Twitter and compose descriptive text to make images accessible. Note that this setting doesn’t work for GIFs.
- Add and edit alternative text descriptions to images posted on Instagram.
- Add and edit alternative text descriptions to images posted on Facebook.
- If possible, test your tweet with assistive technology before posting it.
Facebook, Twitter and Google are working on increasing their accessibility, but their platforms aren't always fully accessible to all users. There are resources that may help you meet your accessibility needs:
EasyChirp third-party Twitter interface