Twitter

Twitter is a popular platform for sharing news, videos and images—so accessibility matters here.

Luckily, Twitter offers some built-in accessibility tools, including adding alternative text to images. To enable their accessibility tool:

1. Click on your account’s icon located in the top right.
2. Scroll down to “Settings and privacy.”
3. Click on “Accessibility,” located at the bottom of the navigation bar.
4. Click on “Compose image descriptions.” 

When you tweet, you will have the option to “Add description” under the photo. You are not able to add descriptions to GIFs and videos.

Other Twitter tips

• Use a URL shortener like bit.ly to minimize the number of characters in the hyperlink.
• Capitalize the first letter of each word in a hashtag for readability for screen-reading devices. (Example: #MondayMotivation vs. #mondaymotivation)
• Add captions to videos before uploading or upload videos to YouTube and use a link in tweets. You will not have enough characters to tweet captions of a video.  
• If you post text over an image or tweet a GIF, provide alternative text in a comment on the tweet.
• Note: If you share an image via a scheduling program like Hootsuite, as of now, you are unable to provide alternative text; therefore, photos will not be able to be scheduled until social media management programs provide accessibility options.