If you have a Twitter feed on your website, how you post to it might affect the accessibility of the posts on the website itself.
1. Alternative text
We’ve touched on alternative text when adding images directly to the website, and the same applies when adding images to Twitter. Adding alternative text will make images accessible on Twitter, as well as when they show up in the feed pulled through to the website.
When adding an image to a Tweet, you should see the option to ‘Add description’ – this is where you should enter your alternative text for that image.
Twitter allows up to 1,000 characters, so you can be as descriptive as possible.
2. Camel case hashtags
Hashtags aren’t obvious to assistive technologies – but we can improve that with ‘camel case’. Camel case is where you start each new word with a capital letter, even if there are no spaces between them, as is the case with hashtags.
Without capital letters, screen readers will presume that entire hashtag is one word, and try to pronounce it as one. Or it will break the word up inconsistently. For example, when I listen to the following hashtag with a screen reader
#hashtaglikethis
I hear ‘hashtag-lie-keth-iss’. So it gets the word hashtag, but the rest becomes a bit meaningless. However, if I instead use
#HashtagLikeThis
I hear ‘Hashtag Like This’ – because the capital letters instruct the screen reader where the word should be broken up.
This doesn’t only help assistive technologies – it makes your hashtags much easier to read in general, especially for those with difficult reading, by making it clearer visually where the word should be broken up.