Guidance for Inclusive Marketing

Social Media Considerations

• Consider using images, illustrations, video, audio, and symbols to help clarify meaning
• Don’t overuse Hashtags (max of 3), make sure each hashtag starts with a capital so it will be recognised by a screen reader
• Use captions and subtitles for videos - this opens the content up to everyone and not just those with hearing impairments
• Only use a GIF if it adds value to the content; research has found that people with some cognitive or visual impairments find GIFs difficult to engage with and may distract users from the message

Twitter Twitter

• Capitalize the first letter of each word in a hashtag; notice how much more easily you can read #DSWSocialMedia versus #dswsocialmedia.
• Avoid using acronyms in your posts where possible.
• If you have a hyperlink in your tweet, indicate what type of resource it leads to by adding [PIC], [VIDEO] or [AUDIO].

• Use a URL shortener (Tiny URL or another) to minimize the number of characters in the hyperlink.

• Place mentions and hashtags at the end of your tweets. This particularly helps users using screen readers, because links can be cumbersome to read aloud, and it helps to completely establish the context of the post before suggesting that a user navigate to a different post/website/user's profile.

• Use ALT text to support images.

Facebook Facebook

• Add a caption file, or use YouTube’s captioning services for Facebook videos

  There are two options available:

  1. Click Edit after uploading a video and add a SubRip Subtitle (SRT) file, which is a video captioning file format. or;
  2.  Upload your video to YouTube first and add captions there.
      

• Use ALT text to support images. Facebook adds machine-generated alt text automatically. This feature gives general information: whether there are cars, trees, water, or people in it. Although this feature is useful, it doesn’t provide as much context as human-generated alt text.
  To change the alt text of a photo after you've posted it:

  1. ​​Click the photo to open it.

  2. Click the three dots in the top right and select Change Alt Text.

  3. Click Override generated alt text or change the alt text in the text box. You can also click Clear to change your edited alt text back to the automatically generated text.

  4. Click Save.

• Avoid using acronyms in your posts

• Like Facebook’s Accessibility Page for updates on new accessibility features

If you're interested in booking places on a Guidance for Inclusive Marketing Workshop, please contact Disability Sport Wales' Insight and Learning Senior Officer, Dr. Rachael Newport (contact details below)