CharityComms 2022 Digital Conference: Five top tips to make your social media accessible, with Prue Watson, senior social media manager, RNIB and Holly Tuke, social media officer, RNIB

10:59AM Nov 18, 2022

Speakers:

Adeela Warley

Video

Prue Watson, RNIB

Holly Tuke, RNIB

Keywords:

screen reader users

screen readers

post

people

alt text

accessible

holly

include

add

important

read

prue

hashtag

content

tips

captions

image

videos

emojis

sharing

So, I'm just gonna move on now to introduce our next speakers. So we have Prue Watson, senior social media manager, at RNIB, and Holly Tuke, also social media manager, at RNIB. And they're going to do a quick fire talk, five top tips to make your social media accessible. So over to you, Prue and Holly.

Welcome to our session today, on five ways to make your social media accessible. So as has already been mentioned, I'm Prue. I'm the senior social media manager here at RNIB.

And I'm Holly, and I am social media officer here at RNIB. So today, we're going to look at some top tips to make your social media content accessible. But before we do that, we're going to look, a bit of the background and the context around why accessibility is important. This is because inclusive content is good content. So you need to include everyone and not exclude anyone, you don't need - you don't know the profiles of all of your followers, so aim to include everyone. And that's exactly the reason why because, not everyone might not want to disclose their disability, and it might not be visible from their profiles. It's not good content, otherwise, if you don't aim to include everyone, because people can't access the content that you're sharing. People feel included, and it shows that you care. On the flip side, if something isn't accessible, then it leaves people feeling frustrated. They might not come back. It also makes good business sense, if you include everyone, then you can ultimately make more money. That of course, not is not the primary reason and accessibility stands much more beyond money. It's so much more than that, but, of course, we are aware it does play a factor.

Thank you, Holly. So we're gonna go straight into the tips, and there's lots more of kind of why this is really important, kind of through the tips that, we are gonna introduce to you all today. And to kick us off, we're going to start with alt text. And if you aren't sure what alt text is, it's basically a way of describing your images, and that's across all digital platforms. So, websites and apps and social media. They're also called image descriptions, and what that essentially means is that somebody that is using a screen reader, for example, when an image pops up on something for if like a tweet, for instance, it will read out what is in that image, rather than just saying an image. So for this section, what we've done is pulled out kind of the most common reasons people tell us that they don't use alt text, and kind of responded to those to kind of help give, give some reasons why it's really important, but also kind of ways that you can maybe tackle some of those as well.

So the first one is our posts aren't that important. So Holly's already touched on this. But your audiences can be diverse, and you might not know, how, kind of just how diverse they are. So we can get some really kind of basic demographic data from our social media platforms, and with social listening, you might have a bit more information that's kind of pulled from profiles and stuff. But as Holly has said, not everyone will disclose, not everyone has to disclose, to you that they might have a disability, for instance. So, always go with, there's the possibility that our audience might be blind or deaf or something, and so we should include everyone. This is a really important one for us in the social media team here and at RNIB. Everyone deserves to navigate the world in the same way as anyone, and that includes understanding your posts. So if someone is scrolling through social media, they deserve to be able to experience that in a similar way to somebody who is sighted. There are two more, there are more than 2 million people with sight loss in the UK right now, and that's set to rise to over 4 million by 2050. And over 9 million people live with hearing loss in the UK right now. So it's a huge number of people, and a growing number of people that need us to make sure that we're being accessible. And according to Facebook, only 7% of people feel reflected in the advertising they see. And that figure covers more protected characteristics, then then only disabilities. But kind of as comms professionals, I think working in social space, kind of it, it shows just how important it is that we're all kind of doing our bit to try and help raise that figure up.

Next up, something we also hear very often is, but I don't know what to say. When writing alt text be descriptive, but don't write a novel! You don't need to include every single detail. What you do need to do is include the main elements that need to be conveyed. This means expressing your intended message. So for example, if you're sharing a weather update, and all the information is in the image, that needs to be shared within the alt text, so that all users can access your post in the same way.

We know that reacting to content, that's really reactive, and you want to jump on trends straight away, it's really important, and you want to jump in it really quickly. But that doesn't mean that accessibility should be forgotten. Just take those few extra minutes to write that alt text out, because it really makes a difference. Communicate humor, so that everyone reading your posts can enjoy the joke and understand exactly where you're coming from, and what you're saying. Include all text in the image. If there's any text in the image, write it all out within the description. Again, it's quite time consuming, but I promise you, it's worth it. If you're looking for some examples of good alt text relevant to their audience and brand, then we recommend checking out Nasa, Sarah Millican and our favorite, We Rate Dogs.

Love a dog account. The final one is, but I forget! And this, this is one that I forget sometimes, we're all human, and Twitter has made it a little bit easier for us. So they now have an alt text reminder that you can turn on. So there's just three simple steps, that you need to take in order to do that. And that's to go to settings and privacy, choose accessibility, display and languages and then tick receive image description reminder. And then what this will do, was prompt you to add, alt text if you forget when you including an image and your tweets, and go to post. Only available on Twitter, and Twitter is much further ahead in terms of accessibility than the other platforms. And if if you only did one thing off the back of today's presentation from Holly and I, then we would just love everyone to go off and do this, not just on your own brand accounts, but on your personal accounts too. What we can very often see is that kind of social media professionals, not just in the charity sector, can be some, some of them can be incredible, at putting alt text on absolutely everything on social and then they go to post on their own channels, and they they forget or it slips, and so add it onto both. And then if you've kind of got a checklist of kind of getting what you need to do in order to get content out, add kind of your alt text reminder there, or we've heard people telling us kind of that they put post it notes, around their computer. Anyway just so that you've got a reminder, so it's kind of built in to your to your steps to getting content out.

And our next tip, which is tip two is all about hashtags, and this refers to using CamelCase and only using one hashtag. CamelCase is when you're using hashtag to capitalise the first letter of each word within the hashtag. This ensures that the words are read out correctly by screen readers, and it also makes them easier to read visually as well. Now, we are aware that when using social media platforms and the hashtags recommended to you, they don't always come up with capitalised. So just taking a couple of extra seconds to write them out, makes a difference, and making sure that you're capitalising the first letter of each word within the hashtag. If they aren't capitalised, then you might spot a PR disaster. An example of this is #SusanAlbumParty, which was often pronounced by screen readers and could be seen visually as #susananalbumparty. Only use one hashtag. This is because screen reader users have to navigate through each hashtag individually when scrolling through social media. So it can get pretty tedious.

Next up, we've got emojis, and this one might not be such an obvious one. But for similar reasons to what Holly's just said about hashtags, it's, it's a really, really important one. And so what we would love people to do when they're creating kind of content for social media, that includes emojis, is to ask yourself, kind of how many emojis you need in that post? And if you want to include loads, do you really need to use that many emojis? So screen readers read out a description for every single emoji. So kind of as Holly's already mentioned about the hashtags, that can get pretty tedious. So we recommend limiting it to one or two per post, and to demonstrate this, we've got a little video that kind of shows the experience for a screen reader user as to what it's like when it's reading out lots of emojis. You can also kind of use this as a baseline for kind of multiple hashtags, and what that experience is like for a screen reader user.

Emojis (inaudible). I don't need to make my post accessible quote. Triangular flag on post graphic, triangular flag on post graphic, triangular flag on post graphic, triangular flag on post graphic, triangular flag on post graphic. Remember clapping hands, clapping hands. Your clapping hands. Content, clapping hands. Accessible. Emoji's are ok but you don't need to overuse them. I don't need to make my tweets accessible. Triangular flag on post. Remember to make your content accessible. Clapping hands.

The clapping hands one is one of my personal irritations. I can't imagine what that must be like, if someone's scrolling through, social and kind of multiple posts like that, but hopefully that gives a good example of what it's like. Over to you, Holly. Yeah.

So, sorry my screen, has just got a bit strange there. So next up, our tip four is all about video content. And this is something that we know you use all the time. So here are a few top tips, and we're going to kind of break it down into a couple of sections. But first up here are just kind of some general tips. So add subtitles to all videos. And all videos with speech must have captions, because this makes them accessible. A great free app for this, is Headliner, which is really easy to use, and again, it's free, so it's really worth recommending checking that out if you're looking for a free way to add captions. Color contrast for captions is really important, because black, white text on a black background, is the best to visually kind of see, and it's really great for blind and partially sighted people to see. This is because most blind or partially sighted people actually have some useful vision and they can see something. 93% of blind and partially sighted people have some useful vision, in fact. Make videos or audio-led. This means that the audio is just as important as what's on screen, and the audio should send the same message both audibly and visually. Make sure any text on screen is spoken. When you can also add audio descriptions to your videos as well. So as well as either having them audio-led, if there's maybe some verbal content that you think audio description might be useful for, that is a verbal description of anything that's happening and going on screen.

Now we know that adding audio-led videos, on adding audio description and doing those voiceovers can be a bit tricky, especially if you're sharing content from other people or other organisations that maybe haven't done that because they aren't aware. If you can't do that, then add a video description. This is like alt text or image descriptions, you can share that within your copy. So make sure your copy is first and share the video description at the bottom. And again, just making sure that either the audio-led or audio described.

So next up, we are going to touch on a feature that's available probably on a platform that we all are really guilty of using probably way too much, and that's TikTok. Now Tiktok has a great text-to-speech feature feature. It's currently the only social media platform to offer this feature, and it means that your captions will be read out loud. So it's really unique. You've probably heard it being used on other platforms. So it's really distinguishable and really noticeable, so you can hear their captions being read out loud. So you might have seen on Instagram, for example. It's really easy to include, so, when you either record or upload your video, tap the text and type in your caption. Tap on the text again, and select the text-to-speech option. You can then select the voice you want to use, there's a number of voices available, so you can choose the one that you like best, or maybe the one that's most appropriate. If you forget to add this when recording or uploading, or you're adding it to other platforms afterwards, then add a video description in the caption.

And now we're going to touch on live videos. It's really important to describe what's happening and important moments. This means that everyone understands the context. You can do this by building these elements into your script, and that way it feels natural. Read out people's comments, not just their name, so that you're giving everyone the context to your responses. For screen reader users, they may have to scroll through the comments to find the one you're referring to. That means they'll miss out on what you're saying. And they'll miss the vital information because they're too busy trying to find the background information. So if you read out a comment, it means that users can be fully engaged, and if you can have a BSL interpreter during live videos or provide a transcript.

Thank you, Holly. And our fifth and final tip is making your copy work for screen reader users. We are surrounded by comms professionals today, so we are not going to tell you how to write because you will absolutely brilliant at that. This is just a couple of tips, to help make sure that the copy that you are writing is as accessible as possible, when you're sharing it. So we live by the mantra that accessible copy is simple copy, and simple copy is effective copy. And everyone's aiming for simple and effective copy, and if you're kind of going down that route, then it's likely that your copy will be accessible. To kind of help with that, here are the kind of three things that we suggest.

So shorten your links. So I'm sure kind of lots of us are aware of of URL shorteners, like bit.ly. So using those to customise your link and shorten it, and minimise the number of characters that screen reader has to read through, and it also helps make it relevant. So for instance, you could have something like bit.ly/RNIBcampaign, which not only makes it easier for screen reader users when they're navigating through posts, but also for sighted users who might be scrolling, and that kind of lets them know as well kind of where that post is going to go, where that link rather is going to go to directly.

Don't overuse capitals, so screen readers will pick up all capitals, which means users don't understand what's being said. So, as an example, if I take that word kind of don't, at the beginning of that sentence, it would read it out as capital D, capital O, capital N, capital T, and you can see kind of how quickly you will lose the meaning or what kind of what's being said, because you're trying to work out what the words are. There was a trend, a while back, of the - it was the two young people at that festival, and she they looked a little bit drunk, and as she was kind of leaning into the boys, it looked like she was kind of shouting something. And people were sharing some absolutely hilarious kind of tweets, and memes alongside that. But unfortunately, most of them were kind of really frustrating for screen reader users, because they were all written in capital letters. So if you see something like that, just think about kind of how that might actually work for someone who is using a screen reader, for instance.

And then our final one, which I'm sure everyone is doing already, is just make your copy, clear and concise and easy to read and understand. That not only that not only kind of helps make your campaign really impactful, but it's also kind of really good for screen reader users and makes their experience, a much nicer when when they kind of hit your posts or land on your website or whatever.

So those are our practical tips to make your social media content accessible and why is important, and we hope you've been able to take something away from that and that it's been useful. But I can see there's quite a few questions in the chat already, and I think we've got a couple of minutes to maybe answer a couple. So yeah..

Actually, Holly and Prue, I don't think we do have time. I'm really sorry. I think what we've what we've realised is that there is an absolutely massive appetite for this this subject. So many people are asking detailed questions. So we will at CharityComms, we will definitely have a look at how we can create more time and space, to share this very important knowledge with with the community. But I just want to say a massive thank you to Prue and Nikki and sorry, sorry, not Prue and Nikki. To Prue and Holly to say thank you very much for your presentation and we are going to move on to our next presentation. If you can answer some of the questions in the chat, I'd be really grateful. Thank you ever so much.