Creating Accessible Social Media Posts
Many UH Hilo offices, departments, and colleges have social media profiles. This provides an excellent way to stay connected with the campus community, and meet students where they are. On this page, find some helpful suggestions to ensure that the content we are posting complies with applicable federal, state, and UH requirements. Even if it’s not hosted on a UH website, if public funds are used to produce the content, then it must be fully accessible to all.
The UH guidelines for Accessible Information Communication Technology (ICT) states:
UH is committed to ensuring that our communications with individuals with disabilities are as equally effective as our communications with individuals without disabilities. With respect to these guidelines, “accessible” ICT means a person with a disability is afforded the opportunity to access the same information and services as a person without a disability in an equally effective and integrated manner. A person with a disability should be able to obtain an accurate, accessible version in an independent, and timely manner. Although this might not result in an experience identical to that of a person without disabilities, the alternate version still must ensure equal access to the educational materials, benefits and opportunities afforded by the technology.
To understand how this looks in practice, it is helpful to compare two video posts:
The first video includes an introduction with spoken dialogue, however the transcript is not visible on the page, nor is a link made available. Deaf individuals would not be able to get as much meaning out of the first 48 seconds as a visitor who can hear.
One alternative method of providing this information is to include the transcript in the post description, or link to it on a separate page.
In this video, all of the words that are delivered by the speaker are also present in the text that shows underneath. More text shows than is spoken aloud, but that is appropriate for a visual medium such as instagram.
Additionally, the video provides a link to an article that covers the topic in more detail.