Baking accessibility into your social content
from the get-go is the easiest way to reach your audience.
In fact, making your social media accessible
can help you get your content out
to as much as 15% more people.
Now, did you know that text is one
of the most common accessibility problems on social media?
If you didn't know, well, you're in the right place.
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Hi, I'm Arturo and I'm a design educator here at Canva.
And in this video, we'll share plenty of tips
and tricks to make your text accessible
when designing content for social media.
We'll look at how to use alternative text,
how to choose fonts,
we'll talk about emojis and hashtags.
And finally, we're gonna talk about
how to test your content's accessibility.
So, let's dive right in.
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Now, we all love sharing an inspiring quote
or a motivational statement with our audiences, don't we?
Posts like this one, or this one,
where text is part of a graphic
are pretty common on social media.
And these kinds of posts are also a great way
to work around character limitations on social platforms.
However, there's a catch.
If we look at these posts
from an accessibility perspective and say,
rate them on a scale from 1 to 10.
Well, these posts score really, really low on accessibility,
and by low, I mean zero.
And that's because these posts are completely ignored
by assistive technology.
What does this mean?
So, let's say you rely on a screen reader
to consume social media content.
Well, screen readers can't read text
that's flattened in a graphic.
What they'll do is just skip it altogether,
and that means that these posts are completely inaccessible.
The good news though, is that there is a workaround.
All you need to do is take your quote or message
and copy it in the alt text of your post.
What is alt text? Glad you asked.
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To tell us all about alt text,
we have a special guest from Canva's Accessibility team.
So Steve, take it away.
- Thanks, Arturo.
Hi, I'm Steve, Product Lead for Accessibility here at Canva.
We're on a mission to empower the world
to create accessible designs.
A great start is making alternative ways
to consume visual content.
Alt text stands for alternative text,
it's an alternative way of understanding
what we want users to see.
On content, it's essentially an invisible description
that's added to all meaningful images online.
The alt text gets picked up
by screen readers and read aloud.
So, for blind and low-vision users using screen readers,
they can hear the alternative text
associated to that image or post,
and all users get the same meaning.
Now, more often than not,
content creators don't add alternative texts to their posts,
either because they forget to do it,
or because they don't know how they can do it.
The great news is that all the major social media platforms,
like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn,
all have ways to add alternative text
to your images and GIFs.
So, if you take our post from before,
let's see how to make it more accessible.
Say we wanna post this on Twitter,
simply upload your image and click Add Description.
If you're doing this for the first time,
you'll see a handy pop up
with some info about alternative text.
And all you need to do is add your text here,
it's really that simple.
Now, there are a couple of things
to bear in mind when writing your alt text.
The alt text is really here
to help your audience access your content,
so it's best to avoid things like emojis,
hashtags, and complicated links.
And we'll see later why things like emojis
and hashtags can get in the way of accessibility.
Also, you may be wondering,
what do I do if the alt text isn't supported
by the social media platform I'm using?
Well, in this case, always copy your text
to the post captions or as the first comment.
- Thanks, Steve, for this great information.
It's really amazing to see how simple it is to add alt text,
and how much difference that can make to so many people.
I'd love to know in the comments,
have you ever added alt text to your social posts?
If you haven't, how likely are you to start doing it now?
We're always keen to hear
from our community of social creators,
so drop us a line in the comments.
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Okay, time to move on to the next section on text.
We can't really talk about text in design
without talking about fonts and legibility.
Fonts are super important
because they really make the personality of your brand.
It's easy to fall into the temptation
of going for fonts that just look cool,
I've certainly done that myself.
However, fonts that look great aren't always easy to read,
and that has a big impact
on the accessibility of your content.
So, the question is,
how do you choose the best font for your posts?
As a rule, keeping it simple always pays off,
but let's break it down into a couple of do's and don'ts.
First of all, you want to avoid decorative fonts,
like this one, whenever you can.
The shapes of these fonts are pretty complex
and may be hard to read for some people.
Secondly, choose a Sans-serif font over a Serif font.
And if what I've just said sounds like a lot of gibberish,
now is probably a good time to talk about font types.
Essentially, fonts are divided into two groups.
We have Serif fonts, these are fonts
that come with decorative flourishes,
also known as serifs, like these ones.
And then, we have Sans-serif fonts, which are simple fonts
where the letters don't have these tiny details or tails.
And studies suggest that Sans-serif fonts are easier to read
and so more accessible than Serif fonts.
Speaking of fonts,
how often have you come across people on social media
that use alternative characters to jazz up their profiles?
Now, these characters can be tricky
to read for assistive devices.
So, you may end up with a long string
of unintelligible noises as in...
- [Screen Reader]
giving yourself permission to P-A-U-S-E.
- And who wants to hear that?
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I don't about you,
but I probably use hundreds of emojis every day.
Emojis are everywhere, and they do a pretty good job
of expressing a whole range of emotions
in just one simple image.
As you can imagine, that usually means
that what comes out of the screen reader
often doesn't make an awful lot of sense.
- [Screen Reader]
with this product.
The new new feature ticks check all the package box,
package box, package box.
- So, how do we turn the use of emojis from bad to good?
Steve, back to you.
- We all use emojis to convey meaning,
so here are a few basic rules to follow.
First of all, emojis can make things less accessible
when they're used to replace words.
This can change the meaning
of what gets read out by the screen readers.
Also, it's best not to use emojis as bullet points.
Instead, place your emojis at the end of your message,
caption, or the sentence to emphasize your point.
This will create a much better experience
for anyone who uses assistive technology.
Finally, you wanna be an emoji user, not an emoji offender.
Emojis can be a nice touch as something
that compliments the mood of your message,
so don't pepper your messages
with tons of emojis or long strings of them
as screen readers will read out the alt text for each one.
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- And we can't talk about emojis
without talking about the other pillar
of social media, hashtags.
Hashtags are amazing in many ways.
They help you grow your audience,
and they guide people towards your content.
Most of the time, hashtags are made up of multiple words,
and this can be a bit of a nightmare
for people with dyslexia, or again,
for people who use screen readers to navigate social media,
and they can also be generally misunderstood.
Now, I don't know how many of you remember this hashtag.
It came out back in 2013 when Margaret Thatcher,
the former UK Prime Minister passed away,
and it started trending pretty quickly on Twitter.
However, what happened is that many people
read it incorrectly as, "Now that Cher is dead,"
which obviously sent Cher fans into a complete frenzy.
Fortunately, Cher was still alive and kicking,
and all of the drama could have been easily avoided
by capitalizing the individual words in the hashtag.
Capitalizing the first letter of each word
helps screen readers separate the words from each other
and read them out correctly.
And here's some trivia for you,
capitalizing the first letter of every word
in a hashtag is also known as camel case.
And that's because the capital letters
make the hashtag look like the humps on a camel's back.
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Last but definitely not least, the ultimate way to see
if your social media copy is accessible is to test it out.
You can upload your content
to a private or unpublished account,
and then download text-to-speech programs,
like VoiceOver for iPhones or TalkBack for Android.
This will give you a chance to test your content
and adjust it without anyone knowing.
Even better, talk to your audience
and ask them if your content is working for them.
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All right, this brings us to the end of our video
on text and accessibility, so let's recap.
Remember to keep your language simple
and easy to understand.
Don't forget to add alt text to your posts.
Choose your fonts wisely, and where possible,
use simple Sans-serif fonts.
Use emojis as a nice touch at the end of your messages,
but don't use them to replace words or bullet points.
Use camel case for your hashtags.
And test out your content using programs
like VoiceOver or TalkBack.
And most importantly,
talk to your audience and get their feedback
to make sure your content meets their needs.
Hopefully, this has given you some key steps
to start making your text more accessible.
If you wanna practice,
check out our resources in the video description below.
And don't miss the next video in our Accessibility series,
we're gonna get into all things color, images, and videos.
Thank you for watching and see you there.
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