Creating an Accessible Twitter Post

General Post Guidelines:

Go into your settings and turn on alternative text for images
When you tweet a hyperlink, indicate whether it leads to [AUDIO], [PIC], or [VIDEO]
Use a URL shortener (Z Link or another) to minimize the number of characters in the hyperlink
Put mentions and hashtags at the end of your tweets
Capitalize the first letter of each word in a hashtag, (which is called camelbacking; the difference between #csusmcougars and #��Cougars)
Avoid using acronyms in your posts
If you are including videos in your post, make sure they are accurately captioned

Avoid posting images with text in them.

Too much text example — This Twitter image has more text than is recommended.

Ok amount of tet — This Twitter post is acceptable.

If you must include text in your Tweet's image be sure to include ALL text displayed in the image as the post's caption OR add in an alternative text.

Add in alternative text to your images but make sure they aren't redundant with the post caption.

How to add alternative text:

Navigate to Settings
Seelct "Display and sound"
Select "Accessibility"
Turn on "Compose image descriptions".

Put hashtags at the end of your tweet.

Hashtags can be problematic for screen readers. If you are adding in a lot of hashtags to your Twitter post, try putting them at the end of your postso that way a screen reader user can choose to read the hashtags or not.

Don’t use decorative fonts in profile or captions.

decorative font example

Decorative fonts are unfortunately 100% INACCESSIBLE to screen readers. When you use them on Twitter (or other social media areas), one of two things will happen - The screen reader will be silent when “reading” those words and only share what you have written in the native font or you will get some illogical sounding string of words. It is best to skip decorative fonts all together.

Always caption videos

Accurate cations are required on video content on any platform. Captions can be either closed captions (where a user can turn them on and off) or open captions (where the text is embedded into the video and cannot be turned on or off). Check the social media platform’s accessibility support features to determine which captioning type (closed or open) must be employed for captions to appear when a video plays. You can request captions to be added to videos by filling out the .

Avoid GIFs or post context for animated GIFs

At this time, the animated GIF format has either very limited or no accessibility support on most social media platforms. This makes the animated GIF content difficult for individuals who rely on screen readers to perceive. Therefore, you should not rely solely on animated GIF content in a social media post. When using animated GIFs, confirm that the post can be understood through its text content alone.

Limit emojis and emoticons

Emojis displayed on a screen will be described by a screen reader. The 😊 emoji, for example, will be read aloud as “smiling face with smiling eyes.” Please be considerate of screen reader users by using emojis sparingly and by placing spaces between them.

It is not advised to create emoticons with text and are suggested to be avoided. In this example, this visual experience of “shruggie” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ will be read aloud by a screen reader as: “Macron, backslash, underline, katakana, underline, slash, macron.”

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