Having a Conversation About Social Media Accessibility
Let’s be the ones to start the conversation
The important task of making your social media accounts accessible for those with disabilities requires mindfulness, thought, and consideration. Sometimes in the rush to post, it can be very easy to forget to add alt-text image description or not caption a video. After all, if you are a team of one like most social media managers in higher education, who is going to hold you accountable? Chances are your supervisors and university administration don’t use screen readers and are unaware of these accessibility issues that you are working to resolve. This is why it is vital to have a conversation with your supervisors and campus stakeholders about the importance of accessibility in social media and the measures you are taking to improve it.
It is not enough to quietly add alt-text to your social posts, we must all advocate for better social media accessibility and with it, overall accessibility across our campuses. This starts with having conversations. I recently set out to do just that in my role as social media manager at our university.
One of my first steps in starting the accessibility conversation at our university was to reach out to our office of disability services. It was my hope that they could help provide me with some best practices and guidelines for making our university’s social media more accessible. However, when I went to their Facebook page, this was the most recent image posted:
(Image of Stevie Wonder overlaid with text reading “We need to make every single thing accessible to every person with a disability.”)
The irony of such an inaccessible image posted without alt-text, proclaiming the need to make everything accessible was a wake-up call to how much work I had in front of me. But, it was also an opportunity to start a conversation and a chance to learn. One thing to remember as you attempt to start a conversation about accessibility is never to call out but to always invite in. If I barged into their office pointing out how terribly inaccessible their social media accounts were, I would have created a lot of hurt feelings and anger, and probably wouldn’t accomplish much at all. We all have to start somewhere in this work. I will admit to creating inaccessible social media content for years before I became aware of the issue. I honestly thought it was something left to the platforms to work out; that Twitter and Facebook were covering this for me. It’s hard and more than a bit painful to look back at my ignorance of the issue and perhaps that difficulty keeps others from working to improve accessibility. But we must push through it, acknowledge our own ignorance and move forward.
Our office of disability services does amazing work. They are wonderful people with a true desire to help and are a vital part of our university’s mission. But clearly, We had some work to do. While their understanding of accessibility on the web and social media was lacking, they were also eager to sit down with me so we could learn together. At the end of a great conversation, we agreed that they did not require a social media presence. Their original goal in creating a Facebook account was to let students know about their services, but it wasn’t really working out for them. I told them that I felt that their goal was a priority for our university’s social channels and more than merited regular posts on the university’s primary social media channels. Now, at least once a semester, we post about the services their office has to offer. That way new students and their parents who visit or follow our pages will be made aware of how to find the services they may require. They were excited to be featured on our primary channels, and we are now better able to get their message out.
My next step was to talk to my supervisors about the issue. I had been taking time to learn more about social media accessibility and how to improve our efforts. I was adding alt-text to all our images, captioning our videos, and even going back and updating older posts to make sure they were accessible. This requires a considerable amount of time. And while my supervisors might have some idea of the time and effort I was putting into it, I wanted to be sure that they shared an understanding of why it was so important that I put the time and effort into it.
So when it came time for my six-month performance evaluation, I asked that social media accessibility be added to the list of job duties I was evaluated on. This does a few important things. First, it holds me accountable for the accessibility of our social media. As it should be, this is not just a nice thing I do when I think to do it, it is a part of my job that I am now required to do. Second, it makes my bosses and their’s aware of the importance of social media accessibility and that they should be following up with it. If I forget to add alt-text on an image, I want them in my office asking why I dropped the ball. (Well, I don’t really want them there, it’s never fun to have your boss asking why you didn’t do something you were supposed to do, but you get the idea.) Additionally, by adding it to my evaluation, it makes accessibility a continuing responsibility for my position. That way, even after I move on, whoever is put in this role after me, will be required to keep our social media accessible. We still have a long way to go in making our social channels accessible, but in six months I’ll be asked how we are doing and I’ll be excited to share our progress.
If you supervise your university’s social media manager, pop by their office and start this conversation yourself. If they are already working on this, ask to learn more and see if there is anything they need. If they aren’t working on it, ask them to start the process and give them the support they need to do so. Erika Boltz’s presentation “The Next Layer: Baking in Accessibility Needs” and Chris D'Orso and Justin Romack’s presentation, “Can You Do It In The Dark? Making Your Social Media Accessible” both from the HighEdWeb Conference are great places to start. Give your social media the time and resources to learn more about social media accessibility and follow up with their progress.
Making sure your school’s social media accounts are accessible for everyone is vital and important work. But, it’s also part of those behind-the-scenes details that aren’t immediately evident to everyone. You’re never going to go viral because your image has great alt-text, your university president is never going to stop by to congratulate you on the captions on your videos, but that doesn’t make it any less important. I often say that social media is easy to do, but hard to do well. Accessibility is part of social media done well. Not only that, it’s just the right thing to do. We can make our small corner of the web a better place for everyone. But to make it happen, we must advocate for the work we do, we must advocate for accessibility. And that means being the one to start the conversation at your school.
-Special thanks to Erika Boltz for her help with this post. Her work is incredible and you should follow her on Twitter.