Accessibility

By: Alex Bennett
Text Type: Blog
Date: 09-24-2023

       When it comes to addressing disability and access within and between platforms, I have discovered that understanding what disability is and knowing where it is applicable is key to adapting your content successfully. Firstly to understand disability, as explained by Dustin Kidd, we must not consider them “based on a list of conditions, but rather on a series of questions about how respondents interact with the world around them”. Essentially to effectively reach audiences that are considered disabled we need to look at our content exertnally. This can be a simple change like having a generally basic understanding of how colors are perceived by the visually impaired. This is something I took care to address when creating the post for this week as I intentionally chose a blue background because it is one of the few colors that many color blind people are able to identify, it also created a good contrast with my skin tone when lighted correctly. Even just going through the process of setting up proper lighting can help certain groups of people to better follow the visuals of your content.

       This idea of understanding and applying disabled-friendly features continues into Sehl’s inclusive design article. Before this reading I had never really considered how much of a difference alt text can make when it comes to understanding a piece of content. This is especially true for instagram, there are many instances where Instagram and its users rely so heavily on the image/video sharing part of the platform that the aspect of legible and clear text attached to the content is lost. I am also guilty of this, there was almost a year straight of posts that I have made with captions composed entirely of emojis and hashtags. I was careful to also address this difficulty in my Week 5 submission using descriptive language to carry the reader through my thoughts rather than expect immediate understanding. This idea continues Belmonte’s mention of the importance of video captioning. I was actually really surprised to find just how easy it is to get very clear and precise captions for my video. I think I assumed that because a lot of videos on instagram do not have captions that it was a difficult process but it took me less than 5 minutes to get it fully captioned just using one application. Maximizing accessible texts was a very important part of my process with this post.

        As for accessibility with other accounts I turned my attention towards University of Pittsburgh’s Instagram account @pittoficial to see how successfully they are able to address the requirements of what makes for good, accessible content. The post I have decided to analyze was a reel covering the Vintage Grand Prix held in Schenley Park. The caption on the video is not too bad, it is quite brief but effectively uses the tag feature within the sentences which can be helpful for the visually impaired with audio readers to better understand the content of the video. In addition to this the real has both engaging audio and high quality captioning to appeal to either deaf or blind audiences. No emojis are used which eliminates the confusion of how they are perceived within the video. The colors are pretty bright when showing the cars and then neutral between the people that way the audience can distinguish pretty effectively between shots. The video does not feature any language I would deem ableist or not inclusive. However I will note that both of the accounts that were tagged in the video feature acronyms which without context can be confusing to understand. However the fonts featured in this are pretty clear, only a few times are italics featured to create contrast but never inherently confusing. Overall a very good and well formatted post in my opinion when compared to the practical requirements discussed in class. From evaluating this and creating post of my own I think I understand how easily and almost unknowingly accessible content can be made and implemented into most if not all of our social media posts.