Government agencies are increasingly using social media to engage with citizens, share information and deliver services more quickly and effectively than ever before. But as social content, data and platforms become more diverse, agencies have a responsibility to ensure these digital services are accessible to all citizens, including people with disabilities. This Toolkit is your guide to Improving the Accessibility of Social Media in Government. Who Developed This Toolkit? Why Is The Accessibility Of Social Media So Important? Who Developed This Toolkit? Improving the Accessibility of Social Media is brought to you by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Disability Employment Policy (ODEP), the U.S. General Services Administration’s Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies and the Social Media Accessibility Working Group, a committee within the Federal Social Media Community of Practice. Working together, these entities have aimed to curate and share best practices to help agencies ensure their social media content is accessible everyone, including users with disabilities.
Social Media Roi
Efforts are also being made to work with social media platform and tool developers, citizens and partners to encourage greater accessibility. SocialGov Summit on Accessibility, which is a product of eight agencies: U.S. Geological Survey, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Labor, Department of Transportation, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Cancer Institute, National Human Genome Research Institute and the General Services Administration. Also included is input from “Sociability: Social Media for People with a Disability,” by Dr. Scott Hollier, Western Australia Manager for Media Access Australia (MAA) and member of the Advisory Committee of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Why Is The Accessibility of Social Media So Important? The Labor Department’s Office of Disability Employment Policy (ODEP) and the Federal Social Media Community of Practice are deeply invested in the issue of accessible technology. Because the development and adoption of accessible, universally designed technology is critical to making sure people with disabilities succeed at work and deliver for their employers.
Top 10 Social Networking Sites
Think about it—could you do your job if it wasn’t possible to read your email? And could you even get a job if you couldn’t fill out the online application? If you can’t access the tools and technologies you need to look for or perform a job, your employability and productivity suffer. So it’s easy to understand why inaccessible technology can be a major barrier to employment or on-the-job success. This same logic applies to social media. More and more organizations are using social media to conduct outreach, recruit job candidates and encourage workplace productivity. But not all social media content is accessible to people with certain disabilities, which limits the reach and effectiveness of these platforms. And with 20 percent of the population estimated to have a disability, government agencies have an obligation to ensure that their messages, services and products are as inclusive as possible. So put simply, the accessibility of social media—or any product or IT offering—is everyone’s responsibility.
And it is vital that the federal government promote accessibility in all of its technology efforts. After all, an effective and responsive government depends on citizen engagement as well as a diverse, well-prepared workforce. And both of these require access to information and technology. Below are tips on how to increase the accessibility of social media. These tips are meant to help social media content managers and other communication specialists ensure that their messages are reaching the largest audience, including those with disabilities. Social media is constantly changing and every day new products and applications are introduced. Although social media content managers may not be able to control the technology behind these tools, they need to stay abreast of accessibility and usability issues and continually test their content to ensure its accessibility. As social media changes, this document will continue to evolve to provide new tips and help address some of those issues.
In addition, there are many ways users access and participate in social media. Though this toolkit is not meant to address the needs of social media users, we encourage users to be part of the conversation in order to provide guidance to those who are trying to effectively reach them. Below are a set of recommended, baseline strategies to improve the accessibility of government social media. 1. Make your contact information available on your social media account page. List a primary phone number and email address where a user can reach your agency with questions, or provide a link to your agency website that lists the appropriate contact information. 2. Make your social media content available through more than one channel. Provide easy points of entry for more information. Some of the most common ways are to post threads on your website, provide options to sign up for daily email digests of social media posts or to add a social media widget to your agency website. 3. Provide links or contact information to official social media support and accessibility teams. Often, social media tools have their own accessibility tips and support help desks.
5. Learn the accessibility requirements and periodically test your content for accessibility.
Educate yourself about them and provide links to your constituents. 4. Keep it simple. Good design and good content more often than not leads to accessible content. SocialGov), and limit your use of hashtags, abbreviations and acronyms. The use of camel case is not only a common practice, but a helpful one as it makes multi-word hashtags easier to read, including for those using a screen reader. 5. Learn the accessibility requirements and periodically test your content for accessibility. Read the Section 508 Standards and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 and other key resources that discuss them. Then test your social media content with a screen reader or other type of assistive technology. The federal government is full of acronyms. Don’t assume your audience is knowledgeable about all acronyms. Take advantage of the space Facebook provides and always spell out the first instance of the acronym and add the acronym, in parentheses after (e.g., Social Media Emergency Management (SMEM)). This is especially helpful for those using screen readers, because after the name is heard and the acronym is spelled out, the user will be better able to associate the sound of the acronym with the full name.
Social Web Page
Add captions to photos to ensure that individuals will understand what is going on in the picture. The captions do not need to be very long, but they should describe what the scene is, and how elements of the image appear and provide context for the image. Videos posted to Facebook should be uploaded to a YouTube Channel to allow closed-captioning. Since YouTube automatic captioning can be inaccurate, prepare an accurate transcript and upload it whenever possible. The link to the YouTube video can be included as a status update, rather than uploading the video into Facebook. This will ensure that visitors will be taken to an accessible video with captioning. For more information on video accessibility, read the Tips for Making YouTube Videos Accessible and Tips for Making Vine Posts Accessible below. Facebook has an Accessibility Team that is dedicated to issues specific to accessibility and assistive technology. They can be reached through Facebook and Twitter.
This allows people using screen readers to know what to expect before opening any link. Use uppercase formats for further clarity to sighted users. Ensure that you link to accessible content, i.e., a tagged photo, captioned video or audio with written transcript. A tagged photo simply has alternative text associated with it that describes the image. 11y is short for accessibility? “a11y” is a numeronym (number-based abbreviation) for “accessibility.” The 11 is a stand-in for the 11 characters that would normally be seen between the “a” and the “y”. Remember that infographics are, by their very nature, pictures. If you decide to link to an infographic, make sure that you adequately describe all of the content with text. Just remember to use plain language and be concise in your descriptions. Also make sure that the infographic itself is easy for readers, including those with cognitive disabilities, to interpret. In other words, make sure that the infographic is not overly complicated to understand and navigate.
Avoid: complex layout and flow that require the reader to follow too many lines or arrows connecting one piece of content to another; excessive images and text; and wide variation and insufficient contrast in the color scheme. Ensure all videos have closed captions and audio description (or a link to a version that has audio descriptions). In addition, a full transcript (of captions and audio description) is useful for people who have both hearing and visual impairments including those who are deaf-blind. YouTube has a feature that will automatically caption videos less than 10 minutes in length. To increase accuracy of the YouTube machine translation, have very clear-spoken words and little background noise. However, since YouTube automatic captioning is still in Beta and can be very inaccurate, prepare your own accurate transcript and upload it whenever possible. Descriptive language needs to be used in video captioning to denote audio and visual elements to users who may have visual or hearing disabilities. Make sure to use easy-to-understand language in your descriptions. Be careful only to include high-quality audio.
Social Network For
People who are hard of hearing may have difficulty with the soundtrack of videos that contain music or other effects, or which have not been produced to high audio quality. To ensure accurate captioning, create a transcript of the video. Dictation (On). Then open up any typing program (TextEdit, Word, Notes, Stickies, etc.) and: - Play the video, pause, speak what you hear, and repeat. Or, if the speaking parts of the video are very clear, play it loud enough for the Dictation to pick up the voice. Overstream: a popular Web-based captioning tool, with a related YouTube tutorial. CaptionTube: a Web-based captioning tool designed specifically for YouTube. MAGpie: a free Windows application from the National Center for Accessible Media. Upon uploading a video clip, add a transcript to cover spoken and visual action to Vine’s “description” field. Alternatively, Vine videos can be embedded in a website where they can be captioned and described. Closed-caption can be embedded Vine video on your website using a tool like the JW Player.
Social Media Relationships
Set up your blog on an appropriate blogging platform. WordPress and Blogger are two of the most popular options for bloggers because they are easy to customize. WordPress offers many free plugins and allows you to host a page on your own server, giving you more freedom to customize the software for accessibility. Depending on your social media strategy, you may want to use other platforms such as LinkedIn, Pinterest or Instagram to connect with constituents. LinkedIn focuses on professional contacts and also allows users to collaborate and share articles and ideas through its group message boards. Your LinkedIn profile should have a clear image to accompany your name so users can distinguish you from other potential contacts with a similar name or brand. Digital Government University (DGU) offers a series of trainings based on these recommendations and expanded guidance. The recommendations in this Toolkit are presented in a “living, open document” designed to progressively evolve based on continuous feedback from all areas of social enterprise, as new methods and tools become available. Agencies, organizations and citizens are encouraged to expand this content by adding recommendations and new tools and tips. They are the beginning of a shared inter-agency approach to this emerging field—one that will allow agencies to collectively advance toward better accessibility to public services through social programs for citizens.
Social Media Marketing has taken company promotion initiatives to a whole new stage. This marketing strategy is used by many business developers to promote and advertise their businesses on the internet. However, there are many different companies out there that still do not comprehend the highly effective effect this form of foundation can offer for company. Here you can find how important this can be for your company, as well as how you can use this strategy to your benefits for developing visibility, reputation, and popularity when it comes to your marketing techniques. Without efficient advertising, the web page that you own is just one in tons, and you may be dropping out to a more efficient plan from your competitors. There are several kinds of marketing but the most well-known has been interruptive. This is where promoters will market to large categories of individuals and wish that enough individuals will see their concept and select their items consequently. Social media marketing is and will always be a much more efficient strategy because it uses something that has always marketed items, and that is testimonials.
What Is The Newest Social Media Site
You see, for promoters to be efficient in any type of marketing promotion, they will need to arrive at a large viewers that is appropriate to the goods and services they offer. People will get attracted only if you will work on proper social media marketing strategy. There are many techniques of promotion in media, such as operating a weblog, using Facebook and Twitter posts, or having a forum on your web page. These will all bring you customers to your web page, and will encourage them to come returning again. Using these kinds of community marketing promotion in social media marketing allows you to get the best from your web progression, and will also allow you to contact people outside the regular area of your visitors. People will get connected online with your business if you keep updated your promotional activities. Creating a good impact indicates fresh, stylish looks, a web page without mess, and articles and other articles which is appropriate and interesting. Using social networking advertising as part of your overall technique will offer you with the side you need when it comes to getting the most out of your marketing initiatives. The reason is, instead of advertising to a wide viewers that will only offer you with a few established results, you are submitting your concept to a bigger focused viewers that is appropriate to the goods and services you offer. Author's Bio: Professional SEO Services in Mumbai, India from SEO Experts.
Social networking is absolutely everywhere. You can tweet a large corporation, visit the Facebook page for your local dentist, and even instant message an old friend at the same time. If you find yourself checking your social media accounts often, consider adding a page for your business. This article will demonstrate how you can enjoy greater exposure through social media marketing. If you are using social media marketing, make sure you inform all of your current customers. If they join your page, most social media sites inform all of their connections that they are following your page. This is essentially free advertising and should not be underestimated. It also has more value than regular advertising because it is essentially a referral. You should be flexible about how often you update your page. If you are launching a big campaign for a new product, people will expect frequent updates from you.
On the other hand, if you struggle to find content to post, perhaps you should think about updating your status less often. Link your social media blog to email. In some circles, this may be considered old hat, Choose Best Social Media Business but there is still plenty of market to be tapped via email. You can simply add a 'subscribe via email' link to your page that will allow fans to get on your mailing list. Run fun and interesting polls on your Facebook page. This is a great way to engage your audience and involve potential consumers. Facebook has an easy to use feature that can help you with creating polls, so take advantage of it. Polls don't have to be about information directly related to your business. They can be fun, interesting, and involve current events. The point of the poll is to keep consumers interested. To successfully market your business on social media, opening a twitter account can help attract new customers. Word on twitter travels fast, and many successful businesses have used twitter to spread the word on discounts or special events occurring at their businesses.
You can gain followers by doing this, and news about your business will also be spread by word of mouth. If you are going into the social media marketing, you have to be able to deal with the negativity that can be associated with it. It is great when your followers love your products and company, but you have to deal with the negative side also. Do not turn your back on it but face it head on and help those customers who are unhappy. Using Facebook can be a great way to promote your business. Facebook allows you to connect with your target audience. If you use Facebook correctly, you can interact with your audience in a friendly manner without pressuring them to purchase anything. If people connect to you on a personal level, they're more likely to be interested in your business. Do not expect immediate results. Develop a good social media strategy requires a lot of time. You will need to keep working on getting more people to add you on Facebook or follow you on Twitter before you can think about launching any serious social media campaigns.
Social Media In English
If you have any inquiries regarding where and how to use 30 Social Media Headline Formulas Grab Attention, you can speak to us at the web-site.
Topic title: Nine Ways To Master Social Media Media Without Breaking A Sweat
Topic covered: benefits of social media marketing, current social media sites, new popular social media, social media marketing strategie, social media plan
