If you are a Twitter user and you use it for work, make sure you are taking some simple steps to ensure that the content of your tweets is accessible to readers with disabilities.
A quick Twitter overview: it is a popular social networking tool that allows users to send ‘tweets’, short text-based messages up to 140 characters long. These tweets are published online to a profile page, and can be publicly viewed. Twitter users can post their own tweets, follow the tweets of profiles they select, or contribute to a wider online discussion based on a particular topic or event.
So, to help you reach the broadest audience with your tweets, here are a few accessibility tips for businesses:
- Put your 800 number in bio line
- Put prefixes before tweets (PIC, VIDEO, AUDIO)
- Before linking to a photo, video or audio, provide a description for context
- Place hashtags, mentions and links at the end of the tweet
- When possible spell-out acronyms
- Use “CamelCase” for multi-word hashtags so screen readers will recognize words separately (#BismarckState not #bismarckstate)
- Test your content with a screen reader
As the ways we communicate evolve, it remains critical that we consider all end-users. For the tips noted above, I would like to thank Andrew Ashby for his excellent information on Social Media Accessibility from the Queens University website.