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#ContentWritingChat Recap: Digital Accessibility Guidelines for Social Media with Alexa Heinrich

Are you taking extra procedures to ensure your content is accessible to everyone?

If not, or you’re unsure what that means, you’ll want to learn this #ContentWritingChat recap.

Digital accessibility isn’t something that’s optional pertaining to online brands today. It’s essential.

#ContentWritingChat Recap: Digital Accessibility Guidelines for Social Media with Alexa Heinrich

Our guest host for this week’s chat was Alexa Heinrich , who is a digital accessibility often recommend. Digital accessibility has become a much more prevalent topic in recent times, as much brands are striving in making their content more inclusive by being accessible to everybody in their online community. As articles creators here at Express Authors, we felt it was a crucial conversation to have during #ContentWritingChat and Alexa shared a few amazing wisdom with us.

Let’s dive to the recap to learn where everyone can make accessibility improvements.

Q1: What do a person mean by digital convenience?

First and foremost, it is important to understand what exactly digital accessibility means so we can easily see why it’s such an thing for our brands. Here are some great answers:

Alexa is spot-on with her answer. Digital accessibility is about making sure your content can be accessed, understood, plus enjoyed by anyone. It should never be inaccessible in order to someone based on their actual or cognitive abilities.

Asking yourself the particular questions that Rachel shared in her answer is a good place to get started. Do your videos have captions to allow them to be watched by those with a hearing impairment? Is it actually easy to read the typeface you’re using on your website or graphics you share on social media? These are stuff that, unfortunately, many of us overlook.

Essentially, you want to take the appropriate steps to remove any barriers that will someone may encounter when trying to consume your content. Place yourself in another man or woman shoes and ask if they’d be able to enjoy what you have shared.

Q2: Why is it important for your digital content to be available?

By now, the answer to this question may be quite obvious. However , here are some good reasons why accessibility needs to be on top of your priority list:

Because Alexa pointed out, there are a lot of individuals with sensory impairments. As a result, they may not be able to consume your content if you haven’t implemented certain actions to make it easy for them to do this.

Alexa went on to indicate that not all disabilities are usually visible to the general public, nor are they all permanent. For many people, they don’t discuss their own disabilities, which means you may not even be aware of them. Plus, you never know when a loyal member of your own community may experience something that leaves them temporarily impaired. By creating accessible content, you’ll have peace of mind knowing that they will still be able to consume everything you share online.

All in all, creating accessible content can help you expand your reach to some much wider audience because you aren’t excluding anyone. This could lead to more brand advocates and an increase in sales for your business.

Carla felt the same way. You have more opportunities to produce sales and it’s furthermore easier to get people to consider that next step when you’ve created more inclusive articles. And like she mentioned, everyone deserves to be dealt with fairly, so you don’t want to ignore those who are differently abled than you.

Carrie sees that without implementing digital accessibility practices, you’re ultimately limiting your reach and your influence online. That’s something no brand wants!

When you take the time to make your content accessible in multiple ways, you’re going to achieve an even bigger audience than you thought possible.

Q3: What are some ways to create accessible content material on social media?

To ensure your social media articles is accessible to the masses, maintain these tips in mind:

For starters, Alexa suggests modifying the way you type your hashtags. Many of us are guilty of writing our hashtags in all lowercase, when they should be in Camel Case. That’s when you might capitalize the first letter of every new word in the hashtag. It makes it easier with regard to screen readers to decipher. For example , #ContentWritingChat is created in Camel Case.

Alexa also considered mindful about emoji placement. They’re better at the end of your post. Captions should always be added on videos. Plus don’t forget to include alt text as well.

Manisha also mentioned adding altbier text to images distributed on social media, while furthermore captioning videos, and using legible fonts. Another important point that will she brought up is checking out to make sure your content is easily obtainable on a variety of devices, from desktop to mobile to tablet.

How many times have you seen a graphic on social media that was difficult to read because of the comparison between the text and the history? Unfortunately, it happens. People who already have difficulty seeing will have even more trouble making away what your graphics say if you aren’t careful. Be mindful of this when designing.

Rachel also said to enable people to zoom into pictures, use legible fonts, plus consider increasing the size of your text.

Carla suggests taking one part of content and turning it into several formats. For instance, she includes both text and video into her blog posts. And she also makes sure to add captions to all of her standalone and livestream videos, which means they can be enjoyed with or without sound.

Q4: Are you able to elaborate on writing betagt text? What makes for good in die jahre gekommen (umgangssprachlich) text?

If you know anything about SEO, then you’ve probably heard about oll (derb) text. While it can be helpful when trying to rank your content searching engines, it’s more good for those with vision impairments. Here’s what you need to know when writing it:

As Alexa distributed, the whole point of alt text is to write the description of the image. In this way, someone who isn’t able to in fact see it (or if it doesn’t load for some reason), the person consuming your content will know what it’s an image of.

She also shared that it’s a good idea to include any copy that’s on the image within the oll text. Then, there will never ever be any confusion about what your image contains.

This is a excellent example of a descriptive bit of alt text. Keep Rachel’s advice in mind!

If you really want to test the effectiveness of your betagt text, close your eye and envision the exact description you’ve written to see if this creates a clear picture in the mind.

Q5: What are some ways to make use of emojis in content so that they don’ t cause accessibility issues?

Who would have thought that cute emojis could create a problem when it comes to digital accessibility? Unfortunately, it is true. And you may want to begin rethinking emoji placement right after reading this:

To ensure your articles is accessible, Alexa advises putting emojis at the end of your social media marketing posts. Otherwise, it can be rather confusing when screen visitors are reciting the text out of your post.

This is why in her tweet over, the way a screen audience would translate the text with an emoji in the middle of a sentence isn’t user-friendly. It may find very confusing to someone who is not able to see the post for themselves.

Alexa’s tip would be to check out Emojipedia if you want to learn more about the descriptions of emojis. This will help you understand what somebody may hear when using the screen reader to consume your articles.

Carla is on a single page as Alexa plus suggests avoiding putting emojis in the middle of a sentence. Place them at the beginning or the end and that means you don’t disrupt the flow.

Q6: Any kind of apps or programs you would recommend for captioning video clips?

Captioning your own social media videos does’t need to be such a chore. In fact , there are a number of tools that can get this process much easier. Here are some to look at:

When possible, make use of the built-in caption feature that lots of platforms offer. For instance, Alexa uses YouTube’s automatically generated captions. However , we know they typically make a few mistakes, so it’s worth going in and manually making edits for clarity.

One more option is to upload captions via an SRT file. If you’re posting a video on YouTube, you can download the captions and then use it when posting to Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.

Alexa also recommends trying Mix Captions as a tool to help make the process easier.

Carla usually relies on the built-in caption feature that many platforms have got. She just makes sure to take the time to edit them prior to publishing. It’s great to find out so many brands implementing this particular feature and making it simpler for brands to incorporate captions.

Q7: How can marketers get leadership aboard with accessibility?

Now, the final task gets the entire team to concur that digital accessibility is vital. To help you with this, you’ll want to remember this advice:

As Alexa pointed out, becoming accessible is just good business at the end of the day. It’s going to have a positive impact on your marketing and advertising efforts, as you’ll be able to reach more people. In addition, you want to avoid any lawful trouble down the line, which is why getting accessible now can be helpful.

And ultimately, taking steps toward digital accessibility shows you care about your own community. It shows that you’re aware of those who may have afflictions and that you want to serve them in the best way possible.

The final piece of advice is this tip through Lori. Please make sure you talk up. If there are ways your company can be more available, take the initiative and share your ideas with regard to changing things.

Come hang out with us during the next #ContentWritingChat! We chat on the first Tuesday of every month at 10 AM Central. All you need to perform is follow @ExpWriters plus @writingchat for all the latest.

The post #ContentWritingChat Recap: Digital Accessibility Best Practices intended for Social Media with Alexa Heinrich appeared initial on Express Writers .

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