 This is the TechSoupConnect Texas chapter. And I want to thank people for taking the time to join us. We do have, if I can get that window up real quick, sorry, I did not have it here. A couple of other events coming up here in the near future. So on September 13th, we're going to have a presentation about Google Analytics and to help people understand how to use them and the specific things that are important, what's important and what not. It's not as important. And then on November 8th, we're going to have a presentation about relationship advice. And this is about working with your technology partner. So if your company works with somebody like my company, Square, where we do backend development, it's important to understand how to really have that good relationship with somebody like my company to help you get the most out of your technology. Because sometimes people are using tech, I say it all the time, and they are. They have been instructed on the best ways to really leverage everything. So that's a really good one to also hear and come see. But I'm going to go ahead and tell you who is here. And I'm very excited about this. Alexa Hirink is an award-winning social media manager in Central Florida. Creator of the website, Accessible Social and Social Media Tee. And author of Accessible Social, a beginner's guide to creating inclusive social media content. She is a passionate advocate for creating accessible and inclusive content for digital communications, as well as educating others about the realities of working in social media. And I'm just going to say I didn't write that I read that. And I know that most of this is true because I follow Alexa on Twitter and pretty much 90 percent of her texts are about, hey, here's something you could be doing better. I've also seen one of her presentations before and can tell you that it's very informative and it is something that not just that just only help you with social media, but can help you get a perspective of what's important in terms of accessibility. So with that, as promised, I was going to give it about five minutes. So I filled about four here. I'm going to turn this over to Alexa and let her start talking. Others will probably pop in as we go and that would be great too. Alexa. Perfect. Thank you so much for that lovely introduction, Mark. I am going to turn my camera off just because I live in a cinder block house on a barrier island in Florida. So our white guy does weird things when I turn my camera on and share my screen. So let me go ahead and get set up here. I'm very excited to talk to everyone today about making accessible social media content. All right. Oh, just good. Go. Hold on. OK. So this is accessible social. I will take all questions at the end just because sometimes you might think of a question that ends up getting answered in a later slide. So just keep yourselves on mute and we'll do Q and A at the end. Now, according to a 2021 report from the World Health Organization, an estimated 15% of the global population has some sort of disability. Roughly 466 million people worldwide have disabling hearing loss and about 2.2 billion people have some form of vision impairment ranging from mild to severe. All these others could also be much larger because not everyone is comfortable disclosing that they are disabled. A wide range of disabilities exist in the world from physical to cognitive, but for the purposes of this presentation, I'm mostly going to be focusing on disabilities that affect a person's hearing and vision. I will also reference different assistive technology throughout the presentation, including screen readers and text-to-speech programs. You'll get to experience my iPhone's text-to-speech program as well as they use it for various demonstrations of good and bad examples of social media content. Most smartphones actually have text-to-speech programs built into them, turning a phone into a screen reader. So you're going to hear mine and I use an iPhone, so it's called the voiceover program. When it comes to accessibility, many digital marketers and content creators want to know what makes them important for social media and what it means to be inclusive online. Not everyone experiences or navigates digital spaces the same way. As mentioned earlier, there are millions of people with disabilities who rely on assistive technology and practices to access digital content. Disability is diverse and it comes in different forms. Most people think of permanent states when disability is mentioned, such as vision or hearing loss that cannot be medically treated or reversed, but disability is actually the only diverse community that you can join and lead. Some individuals are born with their disability while others become disabled later in life. It's a full spectrum of possibilities and scenarios. Someone could also have a temporary impairment due to an injury like a bruised eye or an illness such as losing your hearing from an ear infection. Someone could also have a situational impairment, which means they're affected by their environment or circumstances, like having trouble seeing a screen in different levels of lighting or hearing audio in a crowded room. There are also episodic disabilities, which are disabilities that have no discernible pattern. They can affect you at any given time and change how you interact with the world. Examples would be migraines, vertigo, chronic pain, asthma, and some forms of mental illness like PTSD and bipolar disorder. There are four distinct reasons why accessibility matters. Inclusive best practices can have a direct impact on your marketing efforts and affect how many people you reach with your digital content, like with a brick-and-mortar location or your website. You also want to make sure that your social media is meeting current accessibility guidelines. Everyone at some point or another will be affected by disability, either through age, illness, or injury. Many brands and organizations are trying to focus more on diversity, equity, and inclusion work, and disability is something that impacts every demographic and every area of DEI. And most importantly, you should just care about the experience that your followers have when they engage with you on social media. Now that you know why you should be creating accessible social media content, it's time to learn how. I'm going to take us through your accessible best practices for copy and formatting, images and visuals, and audio and video. While this presentation almost exclusively covers social media, many of the practices I outline are also applicable to other areas of marketing, such as website management, email marketing, design, and PDF creation. So on that note, let's get started. Our first section will cover accessible best practices for copy and formatting. I'm going to talk about hashtags, post formatting, emoji, alternative characters, and ASCII art. This first tip is probably the simplest way to make your content more accessible. You'll want to make sure to capitalize the first letter in each word of your compound hashtags. This method is sometimes referred to as title case, passable case, and my favorite name for it, camel case. The capital letters help assist devices denote the separate words, allowing them to pronounce compound hashtags correctly, and not as one long, mishmashed word. Just listen to how the all lowercase hashtag on this slide sounds. Octopyrisum. Versus how the hashtag in camel case sounds. Octopi are awesome. One more listen for the all lowercase hashtag. Octopyrisum. In comparison to the camel case hashtag. Octopi are awesome. Definitely a noticeable difference between the two. Camel case is also easier for literally everyone to read, no matter the status of their vision. It's just how our eyes track letters. This formatting can also be applied to your Twitter handle to make that accessible, and it could save your brilliant from embarrassing PR moments as well. Just look up Susan Boyle's hashtag fail if you want an excellent example of why camel case is a good idea. An often overlooked aspect of accessibility in relation to social media is formatting. For social media, this means how you lay out your posts and tweets. Because those social media platforms don't really offer formatting options, some users will find ways to manipulate their content to achieve the formatted look they want. This kind of force formatting is commonly seen in tweets where the author has used multiple spaces tabs at hard returns to make their content appear in two columns. My example tweet here looks like it's in two columns. However, the blue arrows I placed between the columns show that tabs were used to create this force formatting. A screen reader would follow the pack of the blue arrows because there's no true gutter in the tweet that tells it to do otherwise. Therefore, the content gets read out of order and sounds like this. This is the path of please stop formatting your screen reader follows tweets to look like this just when you force here for the sake of viral memes tweets into two columns. It's not accessible. Thanks. Not exactly easy to understand. So until platforms add formatting options, you should compose your social media content knowing it will be read left or right to left in a single column by assisted devices and programs. You should also be aware of how you use upper and lower case letters. Some Internet users will type in studly case to indicate mocking sarcasm in their content. Studly case is when you alternate every letter between uppercase and lower case. It's also known as varied case or spun about case due to a popular meme featuring the cartoon character. The varied letter case makes it exceptional car for a screen reader to properly read the words and can create a confusing experience for users as demonstrated here. I'd be impressed if anyone understood that second one because I certainly did not. Going to move on to my favorite section emoji. Everyone loves those colored icons, but did you know that each individual emoji has its own unique description assigned to it? When an assisted device comes across an emoji and written content, it will use the icons assigned description to accurately describe it to the user. Many emoji also have descriptions and appearances that differ across platforms, devices and browsers. This particular emoji is known as abandoned house, old house, haunted house and derelict house. Even emoji with skin tones get additional information added to their base description to keep them unique. If a screen reader were to read this line of emoji, it would say raised hand light skin tone, raised hand medium light skin tone, raised hand medium skin tone, raised hand medium dark skin tone, and raised hand dark skin tone. Keep in mind that because a screen reader picks up on the descriptions of an emoji, the excessive use of them is not advised. It's also worth noting that some assisted devices will shorten the line of emoji if only one specific icon is used uninterrupted by other icons, characters or spaces. For instance, this proverb emoji would probably be read at us 24 rockets instead of a screen reader saying the word rocket 24 times. It's fast to put an emoji at the end of your content, otherwise you could make your message confusing like with this example tweet that has a few emojis sprinkled throughout the content. Once a text speech program translated the emoji, the content ran into several clarity issues as demonstrated in this short screen recording. Accessible social at Carl Camel case, having a great time on vacation in Colorado snow capped mountain, gonna get some prime skiing in tomorrow sky or going downhill before ending the day with hot cocoa hot beverage by the fire with my BFF women with multiple skin tones holding hands. Sound a little walkie with all those emoji interruptions. Using emoji as bullet points is also quite popular on social media. But unfortunately, using emoji that way could make your points confusing if the icon descriptions are competing with the content and shown in this second example tweet. Accessible social at Carl Camel case keys to a great keynote speech face with tears of joy. Don't be afraid to crack jokes world map going off script is okay mouth have confident body language. As demonstrated the three emoji descriptions interrupted the flow of the copy and made it a little difficult to understand. An excellent resource for digital content creators who want to use emoji in smart and strategic ways is emojipedia.org. This website lists every node emoji along with their different appearances and descriptions across platforms devices and browsers. So when it comes to emoji social media, you should use them in moderation. Double check their description before using them. Place at the end of posts and tweets to avoid clarity issues and try to resist changing the color of customizable emoji unless a specific skin tone is necessary for context. That last tip applies mostly to the management of professional brand accounts. I would never presume to tell someone what emoji skin tones they should use to represent their own identity on their personal social media. Another best practice for copywriting is one that focuses on a trend that has become quite popular on social media in recent years. Content creators have started using external websites to generate alternative characters for posts to make the copy appear in different ways styles and bonds. You'll notice that the yellow has highlighted text that's in a different font from Twitter's default font. Unfortunately, some assistant devices cannot decide for these characters and will typically skip over them, as shown in this first example tweet. I used alternative characters for the first three lines of text and then Twitter's default box for the latter half of the tweet. This is how my phone's text speech program handled it. Accessible social at Carl Camel case. Unfortunately, not all assistive devices can read these alternative characters, making them inaccessible. My text speech program completely skipped the first three lines of text that read, custom bonds are so fun, they give your content extra pizzazz, and you can even bold your text. This is because it could not identify them as readable characters. Even worse, are the alternative characters that assistive devices translate into indistinguishable noises or totally different languages like in this second example tweet. Accessible social at Carl Camel case circled Latin capital letter S. I always showcased a few seconds of that tweet. It actually took almost two and a half minutes from my phone's text speech program to read the entire post aloud when logically it should only take a few seconds. The text that creators should only use the default bonds and formatting options readily available on the platform. Another popular trend on social media that involves the use of characters is called ASCII art. It uses letters, numbers, punctuation and other characters to create illustrated memes and is commonly seen on Twitter. ASCII art is used by just about everyone from everyday users to social media brand accounts, but it's used more and more frequently by major brand accounts now as they try to appear more casual and less robotic online. However, ASCII art is not accessible for screen readers. It assists the devices in our program to read characters and punctuation marks, as they were originally intended. They cannot properly discern when characters are used to create illustrations, and when read aloud, ASCII art normally sounds something like this. So the art is clever, but it doesn't make much sense once a screen reader gets a hold of it. You may have also noticed that not every character in this example was narrated. That's because some characters are so common, like periods, commas, the apostrophes and parentheses, that assisted devices won't say them aloud to avoid making content overly confusing and clunky. So you should probably always avoid ASCII art. It is a nightmare for anyone using an assisted device or program. This next section is to believe the one that I get the most questions about, how to be accessible with images and visuals. Images play a key part on social media, but how to assemble with a serious vision disability experience a picture. Assisted devices of the programs need alt text, a descriptive physical summary of the image, in order to accurately describe it to a user. Take these two tweets for example. They are seemingly identical, except that one had alt text added to it, and the other did not. Here's what the first tweet sounds like through my phone's text-to-speech program. Accessible social, at Carl Camel case. Alt text is incredibly important to making images accessible. Image. Cluster of peachy pink flowers covered in droplets of water after a thunderstorm, 46 seconds ago. Versions what the second tweet sounds like. Accessible social, at Carl Camel case. Alt text is incredibly important to making images accessible. Image. 20 seconds ago. The first tweet obviously had alt text applied to it, while the second one did not, which made a noticeable difference in the text-to-speech experience. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest all allow users to write custom alt text for their uploaded images. Custom alt text is always preferred to automatic alt text that's been written by an AI program, because auto-generated alt text is normally vague and not descriptive or accurate enough to be considered accessible. The alt text field on the desktop version of Facebook can be found by clicking the edit in the upper left corner of an image before posting it to your Facebook page, profile, or group, and typing the alt text in the appropriate field. You may notice that Facebook tried to write its own alt text for this example, as shown above the custom alt text field, but the description of body of water, twilight, palm trees, sky, and nature definitely doesn't do this vibrant image any justice. If you're in the Facebook mobile app, you'll find the alt text function under the three dots in the upper right corner of your image. This can be deceptive, since there's also an edit button, there is on the desktop, but alt text is not housed there on the app, because when would Facebook ever make any sense? You may notice a warning flash that alt text is normally less than 100 characters. Your alt text should be as long as you need to be in order to make your image accessible so you can ignore this warning. On the desktop version and mobile app of Twitter along with Tweetdeck, the alt text option appears as images as add description or class alt. You can also add alt text to GIFs on Twitter if you use their built-in GIF library on the mobile and desktop versions of the platform. When you get to the final publishing screen on the Instagram app, tap advanced settings, scroll to accessibility near the bottom, click write alt text, and then add your image description in the provided field. If you have a carousel of images, there will be a slot for each image on that final screen. Once you've written your alt text, you can click done in the upper right corner. The alt text feature is actually easier to find on the desktop version of Instagram than it is on the app. You'll find a dropdown labeled accessibility just below the caption area on the final publishing screen. Click the dropdown and the expanded view will show each of your uploaded images with a field next to them where you can write your alt text. While Facebook Creator Studio doesn't always have an alt text option for Facebook posts, you can use it to schedule Instagram posts when using the platform's alt text field. Just make sure that your Instagram account is a creator or business account and linked to a published Facebook page. You'll find the alt text field under advanced settings after you upload an image into your post in Creator Studio. LinkedIn has one of the easiest alt text fields to find and as soon as you upload an image to your post, the option to add alt text appears below your image in the edit your photo window. Just be conscious of the fact that LinkedIn has a 300 character limit for alt text, so you'll want to be intentional about the images you choose, lest you run out of room for describing them. Finding the alt text field for Pinterest is also quite easy, but it's only an option for new pins that you upload directly to your account. You cannot retroactively add alt text to someone else's pin that you want to share or repin to your own board. When you create a new pin, you'll see a button labeled add alt text to the right of the image you upload. This is a sample of a few third-party management sites and their alt text publishing capabilities, so this is really for anyone who manages social media professionally and uses a tool like this. Unfortunately, only scheduled social can currently post to Instagram using the platform's alt text field due to API restrictions. But as mentioned previously, you can use Facebook Creator Studio to schedule Instagram posts with alt text, since Facebook also owns Instagram. If you use a third-party management system other than scheduled social and want to continue using it to publish to Instagram, you can simply write your image description directly in the caption area of your post to make it accessible. Okay, so here are a few tips for writing effective alt text along with some examples. You want to write in plain language. You should focus on describing the physical aspects of your chosen images. Resist the urge to be ornate or overly effusive with your descriptions. You want to avoid having your own feelings or opinions about an image interfere with your ability to write accurate alt text. You can be creative, but don't go overboard otherwise your description could become muddled and confusing. Try to be as objective as possible. Focus on accuracy, not length. I normally make my alt text about the length of one tweet, but that's also dependent on the image that I choose. The more complex the image, the longer the alt text will more than likely be, especially if the images feature any copy. Writing alt text is a completely subjective exercise no matter how objective you try to be. It will vary image to image and creator to creator. Just focus on making your alt text as accurate as possible and you should do just fine. Consider positional information. Think about the view someone has when they're looking at your image. Is it a partial view of someone sitting at his table? Do you have a bird's eye view of a snow-covered forest? Directional or positional information can add important context to your alt text. Exclude writing an image of or photo of in your alt text. It's already assumed that your alt text will be for a photo or image. Any screen reader will more than likely say image before or after reading your alt text. However, if your image panel is something like an illustration, a painting, or even a screenshot, you can include that in your alt text because it gives the user a better idea of how to visualize the image. Use proper nouns and names when appropriate. If a well-known person, place, or thing is in your image and adds context to your content, go ahead and name it. I work for a college and we frequently use pictures of our president, Dr. Williams. She's very well known within the community, on campus, off campus, so we will name her in the alt text because it makes sense. Most people know that if we're talking about the president, we're talking about Dr. Williams, so we use her full title in the alt text for the pictures that she's done. You don't need to describe every single detail. If something in the image is significant to understanding the whole picture or post, describe it. If it's not, you can skip it and save your characters for the important stuff. Focus on describing details that are contextually important to your entire post. As the content author, you have the power to describe which details in your image are vital to making an accessible for your viewers. Use personal identifiers when needed. So with this tip on writing effective image descriptions, it should be taken with a grain of salt just because it was written by a white cis woman, me. Identity and description are complex and multifaceted subjects that should always be treated with respect and care. If the race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, or another identifier for a person is relevant to the overall context of the image, feel free to add it. It also helps in this instance to think of your content as a whole. What information is included in the written part of your post? As the author, do you feel the extra identifiers in your alt text would add contextual value to the rest of your content? For example, let's say your content is about introducing girls and young women of color to careers in STEM. The race, age, and gender of the people in your images would probably be contextually important, which is what my photo image example is for. If you're unsure about how the subject of an image identifies or don't want to assume how they identify, stick to neutral terms such as a person instead of man or woman. Of course, the best way to ascertain how someone in your image identifies is to just ask them if you can. Just make sure to explain to your subject that you're trying to accurately represent them and their identity in your content. Avoid abbreviations whenever possible. It's better to type out the full name or title of a person, place, organization, or initiative because screen readers don't always read abbreviations like acronyms and initialisms correctly. Less-known abbreviations also don't add a lot of context to an image. If you use an initialism in your alt text or any of your content for that matter, type out the full name or title first and the place spaces or periods in between each letter of the initialism so the screen reader says it properly. An initialism is an abbreviation consisting of capital of initial header, sorry, pronounced separately. Examples would be KPI, NYC, and FBI. An acronym is an abbreviation formed from the initial letters of other words and pronounced as they were. Examples would be NASA, SCUBA, and FOLLO. And keywords for improved SEO. This piece of advice is more for images on websites, but it's still a good tip to keep in mind just in case search engines ever evolved to pick up the alt text on social media images. To my knowledge, they currently do not. However, keywords in the alt text field on Instagram posts do supposedly affect search results within the app. Just make sure that you're prioritizing the accurate description of your image first and foremost. Alt text should always be treated as an accessibility feature and not an SEO growth pack. If you can logically work your keywords into your alt text, go for it. If not, that's what hashtags are for. Avoid excessive flat and copy. If you're posting a copy heavy graphic like an event flyer or an image that has text overlayed on it, you'll need to add all text for all the flat and copy because a screen reader will not be able to read it. Flat and copy is text that has been turned into an object upon being exported from whatever program it was created in. It's also referred to as embedded copy or outline text. If you drag your cursor over the text on an image and it does not highlight the individual words or characters, that means this, the text is no longer readable and cannot be clicked. JPEG, PNG and GIF files do not support readable text. Usually, assisted devices and programs can only transcribe readable text and cannot pick up flat and copy. Now that you have a better understanding of how to write effective alt text, let's talk about what shouldn't go in your alt text. Emoji icons are typically added to social media content to give it added visual interest. So adding them to alt text makes no sense and could result in confusing alt text depending on the icons that you use. Links in alt text are not going to be clickable and a screen reader will just read them out like any other word in your alt text. Links should go in the written part of your post and not the alt text. Hashtags also aren't clickable in alt text and do not typically add additional context that would make an image description more accessible. Additional symbols like the ones for trademark, copyright and registered don't make an image description more accessible and will get read aloud by a screen reader, so avoid using them in your alt text. Non-essential information and links during the random keywords, photographer credits, promotional information, calls to action, hidden messages and in any other details that don't make your image description more accessible should not be included in your alt text. It's also okay to use gifs in your content, but make sure to choose carefully. To make a gif accessible, you need to set it to stop play after five seconds. Give users a way to pause or stop the gif. Write descriptive alt text for your gifs. Avoid gifs that contain rapid blinking or flashing. And make sure any text in a gif has an appropriate contrast with the background. Inaccessible gifs can negatively impact users with photosensitive epilepsy, ADHD and anxiety. And our final section will go over making audio and video accessible. I know everyone is probably thinking of captions that I want to talk about video descriptions briefly. First, there are audio descriptions, which are a form of narration used to provide info surrounding key visual elements in videos for blind and low vision consumers. They're an accessible option on popular streaming services like Netflix, Hulu and Disney Plus. As an example, I have this screenshot from my Netflix account. The audio description when available for a show or movie is housed under the same menu as captions and subtitles. So you'll see it off to the left there when it's actually available. A production team has to choose to make an audio description for a film or show. So not every piece of media on these platforms is going to have an audio description. It's really up to how the media was produced. An audio description adds an additional audio track to a video that can be tabled on and off by supported platforms. Unfortunately, traditional audio descriptions are not supported by YouTube, Vimeo or most social media platforms yet. Because you cannot upload multiple audio tracks with a single video on those particular platforms. Although YouTube is supposedly working on a feature that's in beta. So that could change very soon and we might be able to do audio tracks in addition to other video on YouTube soon. So that's really cool. Until then, an option for making accessible videos with audio descriptions for those platforms is to create two versions of your video. One with an audio description interfered with the rest of your videos audio and one without. Admittedly, creating audio descriptions is not an easy task and there are full services dedicated to writing and implementing them. I actually recommend creating written descriptions for your video content instead. Written descriptions are can also help make the visual elements of your video accessible or blind and low vision users. You would have a written description available as readable text with your video. Gucci use this practice for their Gucci give 2020 holiday campaign a couple years ago. The campaign's promotional video featured a 90s office throwing a retro 70s themed party. The iconic fashion brand wrote a breeze visual description of the video in the caption area for their YouTube channel and Facebook page. The social media team for the Amazon pride show wheel of time loves to post short video snippets on the show's Twitter account. But many of their videos include little to no dialogue. In order to make the show's video content more accessible, the social media team will thread a written description to each tweet that features a video. They have been commended by many of their fans and followers for creating inclusive content like this, especially because there's really no way to schedule a thread of tweets. There are some kind of sketchy services out there, but there's nothing really mainstream in order to do this. So this is all manual work that they do in real time. They can't schedule it ahead of. And finally, we're going to chat about captions. Now, no matter where a video is posted, whether it's on a website or social media, it should have captions, sometimes called subtitles. The deaf and hard of hearing users can access and enjoy the content. Captions can also provide a better experience for a viewer with a learning disability and attention deficit or autism. They're also helpful if you don't understand the spoken language, you're in an uneasy environment, if video has poor audio, or if a speaker is talking too fast or has an accent. It's also a well-known statistic that 85% of users watch or begin watching videos with the sound off, making captioning a good marketing move in addition to being an extensibility best practice. I am personally one of those people I found that it's easier for me to understand information when it's in a visual format rather than audio format. That's just how I am as a learner. I'm a visual learner. So captions make video content easier for me to absorb and understand. Captions come into forms closed and open. Close captioning can be toggled on and off based on the preferences of the viewer. And it's typically an option on platforms like Netflix and YouTube. Close captions can usually be moved and adjusted to accommodate screen size as well. Open captions on the other hand are permanently burned onto a video and always visible. It cannot be turned off, moved or resized and are also referred to as embedded or burned captions. Open captions are normally used when closed captioning isn't an option or if the content creator wants to have more creative freedom over the look and feel of their captions. If you're trying to decide between using closed or open captions, choose closed. They offering more customizable experience for viewers in terms of visibility, position and size. So they are the preferred option. Open captions should really only be used when closed captioning isn't available. An easy way to add closed captioning to a video is to use YouTube. To do this, you're going to upload your video to your YouTube channel as a listed. You can now freely work on your video without a popping up in search results or showing on your channel. Allow time for YouTube to generate auto captions for your video. How long this process takes will depend on the length of your video and how much dialogue it includes. After some time has passed, head to the subtitles panel in YouTube Studio to check on the status of the auto captions. You'll know when the auto captions are done because you'll see the option to duplicate and edit them. Once the auto captions have been created by YouTube, click duplicate and edit the auto captions. You then want to revise the auto captions. While YouTube is captioning technology is decent. It doesn't include punctuation or capitalization and it's sometimes startables with proper names. So you should always edit the auto captions and never just publish them as it is. After you finish editing the auto captions, click the publish button in the upper right of the window. You then want to delete the auto captions for the video so that your edited captions are the only available captions. Then allow YouTube time to process your edited captions and sync their timing. This should only take a few minutes. Once YouTube has finished processing your captions, switch the status of your video to public if you want it to be public. So you don't have to switch it to public. You can keep it private just because you wanted the captions. This is personally how I like to create closed captions because it's free and YouTube does a bulk of the hard work for me. Another part to creating your captions on YouTube is that you can actually download the SRT captions file for your video and use it if you upload your video directly to any platform that supports uploading SRT files with videos, which Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter all do. You can also use the SRT file to create open captions in some video production programs. I actually have a lot of videos on my YouTube channel, but most of them you can't see because I just uploaded them so that I could get the SRT captions file from YouTube. Open captions are the practical option when closed captions are readily available. There are several great and affordable captioning apps out there, including Mixed Captions, Clip-O-Matic, AutoCAP, Capwing Clips and Threads. TikTok and Instagram also have a unique text-to-speech feature that allows you to narrate any open captions you add to your content using the text tool within the apps as demonstrated here. Did you know TikTok has a text-to-speech feature? Type your text and then press it. You'll see a text-to-speech option that you can customize the timing of. And that's a wrap! So I'm going to be heading into the Q&A portion of the session. But if you have feedback or more questions for me after we've all longed off for the day, feel free to connect with me online at accessible-social.com or find me on social media. I'm always more than happy to chat about digital accessibility. And the accessible-social website is where you will find all of this information, less more, as well as other examples and demonstrations, various resources. There's a lot on the website and it's updated all the time. So it's really the best place to get the most current information when it comes to accessible best practices for social media. I'm going to stop sharing now and take a breather. And hopefully no one's feeling too overwhelmed, but if you are, that's fine. I give this presentation to digital marketers, content creators all over the world, various levels of experience. It's a lot to take in, but hopefully you feel a little enlightened and hopefully a little empowered to make your content more accessible now. Does anyone have any questions? What are the most common accessibility problems for people with ADHD? So ADHD is technically my area of expertise when it comes to disability. But I do know that basically you can become overstimulated with a lot of content, especially with videos. If you're creating videos that have excessive amount of movement or flashing, it can just be too much and people with ADHD are turned off by that particular types of media. So yeah, you want to avoid that. I'd have to ask some of my friends that have ADHD. I don't personally have ADHD, so I can always look into that a little bit more when it comes to creating content for people with ADHD. But it's definitely a problem that you can become overstimulated from a web dev perspective. A lot of times not having the option to toggle dark mode on can also be overstimulating for someone who has ADHD. So that's always something to consider from a web development standpoint. Some color pairings are also overstimulating and color contrast is a whole thing with an accessibility. So there's a really great website to check out for color contrast and color accessibility. And it's the Adobe color site. Love that website. It has some really great resources and it's just a good tool to keep in your back pocket. If you ever needed to design something with a lot of color. So thanks. I believe auto play off on one side. It's yeah. Auto playing anything is just a bad idea for everyone. I have auto play turned off on Twitter just because it's overwhelming for me. I know actually as a dyslexic myself that the dyslexic community uses text readers for lots of content we can do online, especially long form content. Yeah, I could totally see that. I actually since I learned how to use my text to trigger my phone, I work on a computer all day and sometimes by the end of the day, I just can't stare at a screen anymore and I will turn it on and have it do the reading for me because my eyes just hurt. And I don't want to do any more reading. So yeah, screen readers come in handy for a lot of people. Such a good info. But thank you for that comment. Any other questions? Mark, I know you've seen some variation of this presentation before. Did you learn anything new? I'm a slow learner. So saying that I learned it new is meaningless because I didn't really probably learn it the first time. I just have the individual that needs to be there outside to have multiple times about everything. I had someone say that too. What are some ways or specific format to stay without flattening text? So when it comes to flattened text, it can only be an option when it comes to a visual file for PDFs. You can export and you can still have readable text that hasn't been turned into an object. So you can still copy paste it and click it. But PDFs can only be uploaded to LinkedIn and PDF accessibility. Mark and I were talking about it is a whole other area. With inaccessibility, that's really complicated. I'm horrible at creating accessible PDFs. There's a lot that goes into it. So really you want to just do images that have minimal flattened copy on them, because at least you can put that copy into the alt text. So like I had with my example image with the word freedom written over the man on the hill. I included freedom in the alt text. So it really depends on the scenario and how much text is on your image. But I have a whole section on the accessible social website about flattened copy and different scenarios and solutions. So I think that might be helpful for everyone here to check that out. Thank you so much and thank you for the whole presentation. It was really informative and a lot of different areas. I didn't even know I should be really focusing on. So really thank you so much. Of course, I can say that when I started learning about accessibility, so I have a design background. I have a fight arts degree. And then I sell into social media as one does with social media marketing. And when I learned about it was completely by accident. I had someone ask me if I was adding alt text images, then I just looked at it like, I don't know what your time. And so I started to do more personal research into it. And I realized there was a huge gap in the industry where no one was really talking about accessibility specifically for social media content. So that's why I give this presentation to hopefully slowly fill that gap and why the accessible social website exists. Because when I learned about accessibility for social media, I bounced all over the internet trying to find information that was relevant to a very niche part of marketing. And I don't really want other people to have to do that because it was not easy or fun. And took a lot of Google, a lot of learning. Thank you, Tanya. This is amazing. I look forward to making our organizations, social media posts were accessible. Thank you so much for doing this work. That's awesome. I'm glad that you feel empowered to do that. And I hope that everyone feels empowered. And if you want an easy kind of basics way to get into the groove of doing this, I have a checklist on the accessible social website. You are all more than welcome to download or print it. And it has the basics of today put my hashtags and camel face today. Write all texts for my images. That's a nice little reminder that I can keep on your desk or at your computer. So you just get in the habit of doing this and a really great way to practice creating accessible social media content for professional brands is to do it for your own personal brands or your own personal social media. So I make all of my personal social media accessible. Because why not? Any other questions? It's perfectly fine if you don't. I also did this presentation to marketing college students. So there is no such thing as the student question. I think I looked with some really interesting one had a young man asked if you could hide messages in alt text. And I just looked at it and it was like, are you asking me if you can it? Or are you asking me if you should that you got beat red in the face? It was like, if you should, I was like, no. And I think the answer to that. So always interesting questions when you give it to students. Alexa, I was trying to Google the color checker that you've mentioned with Adobe and currently I failed miserably. Hold on. Let me get it for you. Okay. Yeah. I'll grab that for you. It's a really great site. So I wouldn't want anyone to miss out on that. Let's see. Adobe. Coloring site. Adobe. So they have a color contrast analyzer, which is super useful, but they also have a color blind checker. So you can check your color pairings to make sure that someone has a form of color blindness. It's not going to do something funky for them because some colors look completely different to us. But if you're color blind, they flatten out and can be the same exact shade. So this is the color contrast analyzer. And then there's a toggle in the upper left area of the screen where you can switch over to the color blind safe tool. So I was just playing with it the other day, trying to create a really bad example of a color palette. It was actually pretty awkward. So it didn't want to cooperate with me, but it's a really great tool and it's honestly very entertaining when you're trying to create a accessible color palette, trying to get it the contrast correct and to make sure that it's safe for anyone who is color blind. So it's a very fun tool to use. Adobe always has really great stuff when it comes to accessibility. It's a big priority for them. Any other questions? Cool. It sounds like y'all have a lot to process with this. I know this is recorded. So you can always go back and reference anything in a year and also feel free to visit site or email me. Reach out to me whatever way you want. And I will be as helpful as I can. I will always have all the answers, but I will do my best to at least guide you to a resource or someone else who does. I have a lot of great friends and colleagues in the accessibility world. So there's usually someone willing to help. Before we sign off and give your social channels again real quick, just for people to know. Sure. Yeah. So you can find me at accessiblesocial.com. I will drop a link into the chat. And then you can also find me. I'm usually most active on Twitter as at hashtag Alexa, which I will also put in the chat. Alexa. And then my email is hello at therealalexa.com, which just is me drawing shade at Amazon for stealing my today. So I was here first. They took my name. Yeah. So feel free to reach out and I again, thank you for having me tonight to speak to your group. And I hope everyone learned something new today. Thank you, Alexa. This again, a great presentation. It's a very informative and it's a very important topic that as you and I were talking earlier, not only is it informative for social media, but for websites and all web content. So I'd appreciate it. And thank you to everyone who attended again. This will be posted on our website probably in a day or two. So you can always go back and watch it again, share it with friends and colleagues and anyone who, you know, who needs to have a lesson in how to do social media and accessible. If there's nothing else, thanks everyone for attending and we will call it a bike a few minutes early. Thanks everyone. Bye. Bye. Thank you.