Tips for Making Your Online Content More Accessible
Tips taken from QPIRG Concordia’s Accessibility Guidelines + various online sources.
1. Social media platforms are harder to make accessible, due to not being as customizable. Include alternative contact information like a website or email address, that is easy to find, on all social media profiles.
2. Caption every photo in an album on Facebook. Captions should be
concise descriptions of the content of the image. Post full captions or transcripts of an image or video immediately as the first comment.
3. Upload videos to YouTube and enable closed captioning. Provide your own transcript to make sure it’s accurate. On a website always provide captions for video content, and transcriptions for audio content.
4. Write the full name of an organization or term the first time it’s mentioned in a text, followed immediately by the acronym in brackets. That way people using screen readers will associate the sound of the acronym with the full name.
5. When tweeting:
- Put hashtags and @mentions at the end of tweets
- Capitalize the first letters of all words in hashtags #LikeThis
- Put [PIC] [VIDEO] or [AUDIO] at the beginning of a tweet containing a picture, video, or sound file
6. Try it yourself! If your phone has text-to-speech capabilities, listen to your tweet, status update or other content before posting to learn how it will sound through a speech reader.
7. Ensure good colour contrast at all times and on all platforms. Black text on a white background is the easiest way to ensure readability.
8. Make sure your font is large enough. At least 12, ideally 14. Stick to sans-serif fonts as they are generally easier to read.
9. Provide ALT descriptions for images on a website. These are descriptions of an image written into the code that a screen reader will read. Much like captions, these should concisely describe the content of the image.