Accessibility in Social Media

Social media has become a huge part of the human experience nowadays- over half of the world’s population have at least one social media account (Gleason et al., 2019), and it acts as an easy way to share information with a huge audience with few barriers.

At AccessIT, we believe that it is important to make every sort of digital content accessible to all people, regardless of any disabilities. Since users do not have the ability to change the platform we must use what is made available by the app itself.

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Captions

Captioning with videos is increasingly popular, with many users taking it into their own hands to provide captions. Popular apps like TikTok and Instagram have their own automatic captioning available and it can be edited by the poster so that they can fix any errors.

How to Use Auto Captions on TikTok (Turn On Subtitle Videos Feature)

This video explains how auto-captions work on TikTok and how easy it is for users to edit them

Captioning is useful for people with some sort of an auditory barrier, anywhere from deafness to auditory processing issues, to language learners. Personally, I also turn captions on when I’m eating crunchy food that makes it hard to hear. High-quality, crisp sound with a clear contrast between background noise and those speaking further helps with conveying the message. Tone and music descriptors are also super useful and can provide more context to readers (Kapwing, 2021).

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Alternative Text

In our last blog post, we talked about the importance of alternative (alt) text. It is becoming more common for apps to have accessible options as awareness is being seen as a greater concern. Many times, alternative text will be automatically generated on apps like Facebook and Instagram, but it might be a little inaccurate. User-generated alt text can be more precise than its automated counterpart (Queen's University, Social Media Accessibility), so concise, simple, and explanatory text will work to pass on the message to the user. Simply describing the image as you would to a friend on the phone can be enough to

Not only is it super great for those who need the accessibility but it can also benefit Search Engine Optimization (SEO) by providing specific descriptions that will direct people to content that is more relevant to them (For Seo and accessibility, there's no alt-ernative a content strategy article). In fact, many social media platforms even find that their audiences become even wider after implementing custom alt text!

Instagram and Twitter’s alt-text features are easy to access, only a few taps or clicks are needed to add image descriptors. Twitter also provides quick guidelines for writing alt-text, in case this blog post is out of your reach. (Screenshots by the author)

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CAPTCHA

The original CAPTCHA versus the updated reCAPTCHA format; it is much more simple and only requires clicking instead of typing (How to stop spam with drupal 8's Recaptcha module 2021)

Often there are methods for social media to ensure that new users are genuine people and not robots, but these can sometimes become barriers. This can become a nuisance to the user, but apps find a way to work around it by using phone calls or messages and other verification methods. The denial of service can make users feel dehumanized as verification methods were generated so that robots wouldn’t have access to their site, so it is important to have alternatives available.

Thankfully, there is an updated version of CAPTCHA called reCAPTCHA, which offers an audio alternative to the visual task that previous versions lacked. The audible versions of captchas are known to not work sometimes and there can be no way to work around these hurdles without getting help from another person.

It is also super important to test any added features in order to avoid creating even more barriers without at least finding a way around those. This can be done just by having a person on your team with disabilities let you know how it works for them, and by following guidelines such as those from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

As time goes on, accessible features may be phased in and out with the technology that it is used with, but by keeping up to date with any changes you can also tweak your content to keep it accessible. The relative newness of not only social media but the internet allows for a lot of wiggle room and expansion which might challenge the WCAG sometime soon.

There truly are no downsides to helping everyone have their best experiences using social media, and everything can only improve as users continue to demand better accommodations from platforms. By adding accessible features, almost all users can enjoy the perks of social media. Here at AccessIt, we hope to aid in making all digital media more accessible to everyone.

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Sources

Captcha accessibility. CAPTCHA Accessibility - Orange digital accessibility guidelines. (n.d.). Retrieved November 9, 2021, from https://a11y-guidelines.orange.com/en/articles/captcha-accessibility/.

For Seo and accessibility, there's no alt-ernative a content strategy article. RSS. (n.d.). Retrieved November 9, 2021, from https://www.insidenewcity.com/blog/view/for-seo-and-accessibility-theres-no-alt-ernative.

Gleason, C., Carrington, P., Cassidy, C., Morris, M. R., Kitani, K. M., & Bigham, J. P. (2019). “it's almost like they're trying to hide it”: How user-provided image descriptions have failed to make Twitter accessible. The World Wide Web Conference on - WWW '19. https://doi.org/10.1145/3308558.3313605

Global Social Media Stats - DataReportal – global digital insights. DataReportal. (n.d.). Retrieved November 9, 2021, from https://datareportal.com/social-media-users.

Guide: Basic accessibility on social media. Access Living. (2021, September 27). Retrieved November 9, 2021, from https://www.accessliving.org/newsroom/guide-basic-accessibility-on-social-media/.

How to stop spam with drupal 8's Recaptcha module. Promet Source. (2021, February 22). Retrieved November 7, 2021, from https://www.prometsource.com/blog/how-stop-spam-drupal-8s-recaptcha-module.

Inaccessibility of CAPTCHA - W3C Note update published. Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). (2019, August 23). Retrieved November 9, 2021, from https://www.w3.org/WAI/news/2019-08-23/inaccessibility-of-captcha/.

Kapwing. (2021). How to Use Auto Captions on TikTok (Turn On Subtitle Videos Feature). Retrieved November 8, 2021, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70DByWoaSmI&ab_channel=Kapwing.

Queen's University. (n.d.). Social Media Accessibility. https://www.queensu.ca/accessibility/tutorials/social-media-accessibility. Retrieved November 9, 2021, from https://www.queensu.ca/accessibility/tutorials/social-media-accessibility.

What is Digital Accessibility? Codecademy. (n.d.). Retrieved November 9, 2021, from https://www.codecademy.com/articles/what-is-digital-accessibility.

Yale University. (n.d.). Social Media. Social Media | Usability & Web Accessibility. Retrieved November 9, 2021, from https://usability.yale.edu/web-accessibility/articles/social-media#Test%20Your%20Content.