Recently, members of the ASIP Committee for Career Development and Diversity (CCDD) led by Andrew Duncan and including Chad Walesky and myself (Daisy Shu) along with ASIP Marketing and Communications Manager, Gina Laborde, hosted a virtual workshop entitled “Promote Yourself and Your Science” on September 15th 2020 featuring speakers Eric Perkins from Addgene, Samira Kiani from University of Pittsburgh and myself. We had a great turnout with over 80 attendees tuning in and many great questions. One of the questions that struck me as a very important (particularly given that my research is in curing eye diseases), was on how to make social media posts more accessible to the blind or visually impaired. Indeed, social media is quite a visual platform, with posts often attracting more attention when associated with an image or video. We had a lot of fantastic tips and article links from both panelists and attendees during the meeting so I thought it’d be great to write a blog post to bring it all together.
Handy checklist for making posts more accessible by Alexa Heinrich: https://therealalexa.com/accessible-social#4507070e-7638-4bdb-b181-f18e0fa98a3d
Thank you to Dr. Deborah for sharing the Twitter account @DisabledStem with us! Check out their website for great articles, real-life stories, resources and mentorship program for people with disabilities in STEM.
Alt text is an important tool to utilize with visual content. Twitter has a useful explanation on how to add an image description. This is a great Twitter post explaining how to add Alt Text to your images:
Check out this thread talking about the different types of posts on Twitter and how to increase their accessibility:
Make your hashtags accessible by using Camel Case for multiword hashtags e.g. #MakeTwitterAccessible or #ASIPSocial rather than #maketwitteraccessible #asipsocial
Good colour contrast in your images to increase visibility of content
Add captions for videos
Here is some links for some more tips on accessibility:
Hope you enjoyed this post and got some ideas for making your social media content more accessible!
Daisy Y. Shu @eyedaisyshu on Twitter/Instagram