Varju Luceno: Power of Social Media
Connecting Students of All Ages and Abilities
XLi 2014 – March 28, 2014

What is Social Media?
Engaging Others Online
in
Active and Open
Conversations

What Can Social Media Do for You?
• Make your voice heard
• Level the playing field
• Keep you up-to-date
• Enhance your networking efforts
• Inform and educate others about your cause,
services or product
• Distribute your content
• Help you stay connected
• Amplify your message

People are geared toward connecting
Connection = Value = Belonging

Most Relevant Social Media Platform?
Factors to consider:
• Your audience
• Are you listening, networking, monitoring, sharing,
educating or broadcasting?
• Frequency of updates
• Available resources (time, money, staff)
• Social media guidelines
• Tone / Style
• Privacy / Security

Where should I be: SlideShare, Twitter,
LinkedIn or Facebook?

SlideShare
• Free or paid options
• Share concise, well written, shareable content
• Demonstrate your expertise
• Spread ideas
• Add audio track to visual presentations / slides
• Automatically generated transcript
• Upload content in various formats (PowerPoint
presentations, MS Word files etc.)

Twitter
• Free
• Connect and Engage
• Listen
• Share
• Monitor / Get news
• Promote
• Educate
• Research
• Respond to feedback

LinkedIn
• Free or paid options
• Connect with more than 275 million members
worldwide, find mentors and career advice
• Stay up to date with people in your network
• Search for people, jobs, companies and groups
• Follow Influencers / get insights
• View and save recommended jobs
• Read the latest industry news
• Follow companies / organizations
• Keep up with your favorite groups, participate

Facebook
• Free
• Effective for H2H (human-to-human)
connections
• Personal profiles, pages (companies, events,
causes, non-profits, products) and groups
• Participation is more involved (time-consuming)
than on LinkedIn, Twitter or SlideShare
• Can get very “noisy”

Blogs
• Free or paid options
• The most time-consuming
• Know your target audience
• Relevant content and consistency of posting
are important
• Educate and inform
• Make sharing your content easy

YouTube
• Free
• Very powerful
• Know your audience
• Edutainment (Educate and Entertain)
• Use captions
• TedEd: Lessons Worth Sharing
[http://www.youtube.com/user/TEDEducation]

What About Accessibility ?

Common Social Media Accessibility
Issues
• Lack of section headings
• Poor color contrast
• Inability to navigate using keyboard only
• Inability to operate functionality using keyboard only
• Missing text equivalents (descriptions) for images
• Inability to resize text
• Videos lacking captioning
• Purpose of a field not labeled
• Inability to create user accounts (Pinterest)
• Use of CAPTCHAs- abstract renderings of random characters

Make Your Content Accessible
• Provide additional ways to contact your organization
• Use clear, concise messages
• Include main content first, put hashtags (#) at the end of a post,
important for screen reader users
• If a tweet contains an image, video or audio indicate this at the
beginning of the content or use the prefix [PIC], [VIDEO] or [AUDIO]
• In addition, if a tweet or Facebook post includes one of these items,
link back to the webpage that contains the image, video or audio with
a full caption/transcript
• Avoid the use of acronyms, abbreviations and text messaging
shortcuts if you can
• If you are linking to a PDF document, make sure the document is
tagged properly and accessible. If it is not, also provide a link to a text
alternative
• Ensure proper HTML markup is used such as headings, paragraphs and
lists to help orient users and ensure clarity of the content

Find Tools and Resources
• Twitter provides a list of keyboard shortcuts for keyboard only
users
• Facebook provides a small set of keyboard shortcuts
• AppleVis collects information on the accessibility of apps
developed for iOS devices, including LinkedIn and Twitter apps
• Easy YouTube provides an accessible interface for viewing
YouTube videos
• Easy YouTube caption creator: content creating tool
• WordPress open source CMS with many free plugins, allows
to host a website on your own server, provides more freedom
to customize the software for accessibility

Resources
• Twitter Accessibility: Media Access Australia
[http://www.mediaaccess.org.au/online-media/social-media/twitter]
• LinkedIn Help: Media Access Australia
[http://www.mediaaccess.org.au/online-media/social-media/linkedin]
• Facebook Accessibility Help
[https://www.facebook.com/help/156151771119453]
• Accessible WordPress Themes: The Chronicle of Higher Ed
[http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/accessibility-ready-wordpress-themes/55683]
• Tweeting Blind by Jonathan Mosen (NBP)
[http://www.nbp.org/ic/nbp/TWEET.html]

Resources (continued)
• Social Media for People With a Disability
[http://www.mediaaccess.org.au/online-media/social-media]
• Improving the Accessibility of Social Media in Government
[http://www.howto.gov/social-media/using-social-media-in-government/improving- accessibility]
• Accessible Social Media: SSB BART Group
[https://www.ssbbartgroup.com/blog/2013/01/08/accessible-social-media/]
• Ed Social Media [http://www.edsocialmedia.com/]
• AppleVis [http://www.applevis.com/]

Stay Connected
Twitter: @accessibledaisy, @varjuluceno
www.daisy.org