Why think about accessibility

Accessibility means that every person should be able to have equal access to information and services regardless of their capabilities. In our daily lives it is possible to identify several accessibility strategies such as ramps for wheelchair users or handrails for people with reduced mobility. That is no different for services provided online. Different accessibility strategies are also employed to ensure that everyone is able to fully participate in the web. One particularity of online environments is the mixed role found in some of them, especially in social networks. On these platforms, we are not only consuming information but also providing it and, for that, the responsibility of providing accessible content is shared with all its users. Social networks play an essential role connecting people, being more important than ever and people with disabilities are also interacting with major platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, as everyone else. These platforms provide different resources for users to improve the accessibility of their content. However, in this case, technologies can be used to complement human power but these environments are only fully accessible with an active participation of content authors, that means, users.

How people with visual disabilities are accessing your content on social networks

Most people with visual disabilities use a screen reader software to access the web. These softwares transcribe the content of the screen into a textual version and then synthesizes it into audio. Concerning visual content, textual descriptions are used to provide an alternative form to interpret these content. Images descriptions will be read aloud to non-sighted or low-sighted users who rely on screen readers to consume social media content. However, most of these visual content are not properly described, due to the mixed role previously mentioned. That means that some people are being deprived of fully participating in this aspect of modern life - such as interacting with friends, exchanging information online and others. This contributes to the feeling of exclusion and incapacity already perpetuated over the years.

Major social networks already provide a feature for users to enter this description, and some of them, such as Facebook or Instagram, will provide an automatic description for images by default and the users can improve it in order to provide more details about it. Twitter provides an input field when the user is uploading an image. In this scenario, when screen reader users encounter an image on their social networks, three scenarios are possible:

• Any additional description is provided and this user is not able to understand that image;
• An automated description is provided and the user is able to understand some concepts that may be in that image;
• A proper description is provided by the author, containing specific details about the image and the intention of that image. In this case, a visually impaired user can understand the image and even interact with that post.

Most of the time, visually impaired users are faced with the first or the second scenario described, having no proper information to really understand an image.

How to improve your content to provide better access for people with disabilities

Besides providing a textual description for your images, further steps can be taken to improve the accessibility of social networks:

Dos:

• Provide meaningful alternative text for images: Write in simple, precise language, and keep the explanation brief. Typically no more than a few words are necessary, though rarely a short sentence or two may be appropriate. Make sure an image communicates your intended purpose.
• Caption videos: Add a caption file, or use the post's description area to add alternative text to caption video posts.
• Hashtags: Put hashtags after the image description, or in a comment or post description if you have many hashtags. Capitalize the first letter of each word in a hashtag.
• GIFs: There is very little support for animated GIFs on social media platforms. Do not rely solely on animated GIFs to convey content.
• Emojis: Screen readers will read emojis appropriately. The 👏 emoji, for example, will be read aloud as “clapping hands”.

Don’ts:

• Avoid the use of phrases such as "image of ..." or "graphic of ..."
• Do not overuse emojis.
• Emoticons, or representations of expressions created through a variety of keystrokes, e.g., :), will be read as “semicolon parenthesis” and should be used sparingly if at all.

Examples

The same image might need different descriptions depending on the context it's used. In a social media context, a good description provides the details the user wants to convey according to the purpose of sharing that image. We provide some examples:

Description: A very happy little caramel dog lying in the flowery grass with his tongue out.

Description: Several boats lined up in the port of Marseille with the city in the background and a wide blue sky with a few clouds.

How SONAAR will improve the accessibility of media content

How to use SONAAR

SONAAR aims to guide users into creating and consuming accessible media content.

Authoring

In order to help users to provide descriptions for their images, as soon as the service is started, there is no need for further steps, SONAAR will be running in the background. SONAAR will detect when an image is being uploaded on Twitter or Facebook and will then provide some suggestions of descriptions and concepts that may be useful to construct a proper alternative description. SONAAR will also indicate every step users have to take to provide this description. When a new description is provided by the user, we will store it in order to improve future suggestions.

Consuming

Download the Google Chrome web extension

Download the Android application

References and other useful links

• How People with Disabilities Use the Web - Diverse Abilities and Barriers
• AbilityNet - How to do accessible social media webinar (Video)
• AbilityNet - 5 Tips to create accessible Facebook posts
• AbilityNet - 5 ways to make your tweets accessible
• Harvard University - Write good Alt Text to describe images

Official documentation by platforms

• Twitter official documentation on how to make images accessible for people
• How does automatic alt text work on Facebook?
• How do I edit the alternative text for a photo on Facebook?

Contact us

We invite you to use SONAAR and share your experience with us. You can reach us by email at sonaar@fc.ul.pt or on Twitter at @sonaarproject.