Social Media Accessibility
Middlesex Community College is committed to providing students, faculty, staff and visitors with access to online resources. All authorized MCC social media sites must ensure that all content is presented in a format accessible to users with disabilities.
Accessibility options vary amongst the many social media systems. MCC authorized accounts must ensure that social posts are accessible to the greatest extent possible. The following guidelines should be used when posting.
Alternative Text
- Most accessibility issues on social media arise from embedded images, which may not be meaningful to the visually impaired. Adding "alt text" to images can resolve most of these issues. Alt text describes the content of images, graphs and charts in a way that makes sense to users employing assistive technology such as screen readers. Alt text should answer this question: What is the content conveyed by the image?
- Tip: When posting to social media, always consider how the post would appear without the embedded image. Is the user receiving the same information that they would if the image were visible to them?
- Note: Purely decorative images, which add no information to the content of a post, need not be described in alt tags. However, such images should be provided with null (empty) alt text (alt="") so that they can be ignored by assistive technologies, such as screen readers.
Accessibility for Twitter
- Twitter gives you the ability to add alt text to images in a tweet, but you need to adjust your settings to turn the feature on.
- Navigate to Settings > Display and sound > Accessibility > and turn on Compose image descriptions.
- Once this setting is enables, when you post a picture, you will see an option to "Add a description for the visually impaired." Adding a description is particularly crucial when the picture being tweeted is an image of text, such as an invitation that includes event details.
Accessibility for Facebook
- While you cannot create your own alternative text to pictures you post, Facebook adds machine-generated alt text automatically. However, the machine-generated text may not be sufficiently accurate, and automated alt-text does not recognize text contained within images. Therefore it is recommended that you add descriptive text along with pictures that are posted to Facebook. Ideally, the descriptive text you write will both explain and enhance the meaning of the picture.
- There are two options for adding captions to videos on Facebook. You can click Edit after uploading a video and add a SubRip Subtitle (SRT) file, which is a video captioning file format. Alternately, Facebook will auto-caption your videos after processing; however, it is strongly recommended that once you receive the notification that your video has been processed, you should manually verify and correct the captions as necessary.
- Another option may be to upload your video first to YouTube (see below) and add captions there.
Accessibility for YouTube
- In order to be accessible, YouTube videos must include captions that reflect all audio information, including sound effects or music, and identify speakers. YouTube will generate captions for most videos subsequent to upload, but machine-generated captions may be inaccurate and will probably require editing. University of Minnesota provides useful information on creating accessible video captions in YouTube. WGBH offers a free Caption and Descriptive editing tool called CADET.
- Note: YouTube videos uploaded to the college's official YouTube channel – TheMiddlesexCC – are automatically captioned by an external closed captioning service called Cielo24 .
Accessibility for Instagram
- Though currently there isn't a method to add alt text to your Instagram photos, you should add descriptive text to the caption area for each posted image.
Thank you to University of Washington for their permission to use this content.