While not all social media platforms have accessible interfaces, there’s nothing stopping social media marketers from creating accessible content and becoming advocates for inclusive social media. After all, you want as many people as possible to be able to enjoy your social presence, right?
Whatever else we may feel about the benefits and drawbacks of social media, it has produced at least one clear positive. Disability Culture is thriving online.
Inclusive design principles have taken priority on the web. Google even ranks accessible web pages higher in its results.
The Social Media Accessibility Working Group was created to help government agencies meet their accessibility requirements when using social media. The Working Group, spearheaded by the Department of Labor’s Office of Disability Employment Policy has launched an online toolkit for improving the accessibility of social media used by government agencies. The toolkit curates and shares the best accessibility practices for social media, and it should be understood as a “living document” that will change according to feedback from users or as new technologies emerge. So far the toolkit provides guidance for how to improve accessibility when using Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. While the toolkit is geared towards government agencies, the tips that it outlines can help anyone hoping to make their social media posts more accessible to people with disabilities.
User experience (UX) design focuses on enhancing user satisfaction by improving how we interact with the websites, applications and devices in our lives. In other words, UX makes complex things easy to use.
While the term “UX” is relatively new, the concept of user-friendly design has been around for generations. “Good design is good business,” the second president of IBM, Thomas J. Watson, famously told Wharton students in 1973. “We are convinced,” he said, “that good design can materially help make a good product reach its full potential.”