Social Media Content Creators

If you're responsible for posting to Aims social media accounts, it's important to understand best practices for each outlet. In reality, a common sense approach to digital accessibility will apply when posting on social.

For example:

• Format content to read from left to right, using appropriate punctuation to guide a screen reader
• When posting videos to social media, make sure captioning or transcripts are available
• Add alternative text to images
• Make sure color contrast allows people with low vision or colorblindness to see the content

Where possible, use "camel case" for hashtags, capitalizing the first letter of each distinct word in a hashtag so screen readers can perceive each word rather than reading it to a user as a single word.

Example: #AimsCommunityCollege, not #aimscommunitycollege

Note that not all social media platforms will present hashtags in camel case; some default to lowercase.

Most screen readers will read the written description for emoji to users, which may not always convey what the person creating a post intended.

To avoid confusion, here are some tips from Utah State University on using emoji on social media:

• Don't use emoji to replace words, numbers or emotions
  • Instead of "I'm so ☺️ the semester is starting!" use "I'm so happy the semester is starting! ☺️"
• Put important information before emoji
• Use emoji in moderation; sharing too many in a row can make reading your content cumbersome for people using screen readers
• Don't use emoji as bullet points