Our latest thoughts from the world of technology in education & the workplace

Texthelp Blog - Our latest thoughts from the world of technology in education & the workplace

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Social media has given brands the ability to reach larger audiences than ever before. But when we consider that10% of the global populationare affected by some form of disability, it’s clear that failing to prioritise the accessibility of social media content dramatically limits the audience brands can communicate with.

Accessible social media content is not explicitly required by guidelines such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, but it shouldn’t need to be. Producing accessible and inclusive content should be something that effective social media marketers just do as best practice. However, this is not often the case.

Over 4.3 billion people use social media – approximately 55% of the world’s population. If we contrast this number with the 10% of the population that has some form of disability, this means there are 430 million social media users who may be left out through complex and inaccessible content.

If you’re not addressing the accessibility of your social media content then you’re cutting out a key and significant proportion of your audience. The NHS estimates that in the UK alone there are approximately 1.5 million people who have a learning disability and approximately 13.9 million disabled people in the UK, including 19% of working age adults. This is a huge audience your social media campaigns may be excluding.

How to be an inclusive social media marketer, and how it benefits your brand

When we consider the proportion of social media audiences with additional needs, it’s clear that accessible content is not just a ‘nice to have’ add-on for ethically-minded brands. It’s an essential consideration for anyone seeking to build their brand via social media.

If you do it right, accessible social media campaigns are more effective because they can communicate with the widest possible audience – regardless of whether people have a visual, hearing, motor, cognitive, any other combination of impairments, or are typically-abled.

Accessible content is not only beneficial for social media marketers wanting to reach a larger audience. Implementing accessibility measures often makes content more digestible and engaging for everyone, improving brands’ ability to communicate their message clearly and effectively.

Additionally, if a brand is perceived as being more socially-minded and inclusive, consumers will look upon it more favourably. According to a recent survey by Google, 64% of people took action after seeing an ad that they considered to be inclusive.

So, what measures can you take to produce inclusive social media content, which reaches the largest possible audience?

Uncaptured by disability statistics is the fact that the average reading age in the UK is estimated to be just nine years old. Making sure your copy is written clearly, in short sentences, and avoids the use of jargon or unnecessarily complex language, is a vital part of making social media more accessible. Writing with readability in mind makes your content more understandable and benefits every user that views it.

Additionally, it’s important to consider those with visual impairments when drafting social media copy. Consider how assistive technology, such as screen readers, will read the text. Try to avoid or limit the use of symbols, avoid hashtags in the body of the text, and make sure spelling and punctuation is correct.

Words are only part of your social activity. Videos and audio clips are also tools used by most brands and need to be reviewed for accessibility. Closed captions on videos are a prime example of a measure that benefits everyone, beyond those with auditory impairments it was originally conceived of to help. Closed captions not only help those with hearing impairments understand what is being conveyed by a video post, they also help those non-fluent in the audio language, as well as viewers watching on mute.

As well as videos, images should also be something you review for accessibility – especially for those that may have visual impairments such as colour blindness. If you fail to consider factors such as descriptive captions and colour contrast, then you limit your ability to raise the profile of your brand with an enormous swathe of people. This isn’t something new to social media, in fact, Facebook’s blue and white colour scheme was chosen because Mark Zuckerberg is green-red colour blind.

It’s recommended to use a colour contrast of at least 4.5:1 – this is important for people with colour blindness to be able to distinguish one colour from another. Additionally, avoid using green and red or blue and yellow colour combinations, as these can be difficult to see.

Another important consideration is to avoid using colour to convey meaning. For example, in the West, red is often to denote a downward trend on a chart, danger, or a warning. Yet in China, red represents happiness, success, and good fortune. Step outside your own bubble and consider whether your content conveys the same message in different cultures.

#SocialMediaAccessibility not #socialmediaaccessibility

Another factor to consider is certain formats only used on social – most notably hashtags. Make sure that CamelCase is used for multi-word hashtags. Capitalising the first letter of each word helps people using screen readers by ensuring that they are read out correctly, as well as making hashtags easier to read for all.

It’s best practice to include hashtags and mentions at the end of your text. Punctuation marks are read aloud by screen readers and it is important to consider how hashtags or ‘@’ mentions can disrupt the flow of copy for those using assistive tech to read it aloud.

Much like punctuation marks, emojis and emoticons are read aloud by assistive tech.

Text-to-speech software reads out a description for every emoji used, so try to avoid including a row of the same emoji in your posts. Otherwise someone using a screen reader will hear, “red heart red heart red heart red heart”, which is not only irritating but gets in the way of conveying your brands’ message.

Avoid using emojis to communicate a core message – the ‘official’ meaning of an emoji, the one which will be read out by assistive tech, may not match up with what you’re using it to say. For example, the emoji which is most often used to show hands in prayer was originally intended to show a high-five, but as with language, the meaning and usage has evolved.

While these changes are easy to make, inaccessible social media is still rife. For people with accessibility needs, particularly in the context of the pandemic and lockdown restrictions, this significantly limits their ability to feel connected and to participate in social media in the way we would want them to.

By keeping your social media content accessible, you are prioritising inclusion and presenting information in a clear way, for the maximum number of people. Ultimately these actions are nothing ‘over and above’ genuinely good and effective marketing. They should be central to any brand-building endeavour.

Creating inclusive and accessible social media content

Building your brand via social media? How inclusive and accessible is your content?

This article was originally published on BrandsJournal.com on 21st June 2021. 

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This is a fun & easy way to get involved, and will bring some positivity into your teacher's classroom! Feel free to get creative or download one of our templates to colour & share. 

teacher-appreciation-day-flower-pot-colouring-poster-us-size.pdf

teacher-appreciation-day-donut-colouring-poster-us-size.pdf

teacher-appreciation-day-light-bulb-colouring-poster-us-size.pdf

teacher-appreciation-day-rainbow-colouring-poster-us-size.pdf

Send your teacher a card with all the reasons why you appreciate them and show off your writing skills at the same time. Use our template to get started and then either send it to your teacher directly or upload it to your digital classroom environment. 

teacher-you-are-a-_class-act_-because.pdf

thank-you-for-being-a-great-teacher.pdf

teacher-you-are-amazing-because.pdf

If you're thinking of gifting your teacher, here are some ideas they'll appreciate! Digital gift cards are a great option. You could take your teacher to the movies with a free movie on Amazon Prime, support a local restaurant, or subscribe to a service like Teacher’s Black Box or Teacher’s Crate. Think about what your teacher would enjoy. 

If you haven’t been able to arrange a gift, don’t worry - you could record a short video message for your teacher instead. They will really appreciate the thought & effort, and parents can join in too! Here’s a video that our Texthelpers created to give you some inspiration:

It's 'Ofishal'!! Teachers are a great catch!


Award your teacher with a digital certificate or sticker

It's time for you to become a teacher for a day! Choose from our selection of digital stickers and award it to your teacher in recognition of all their hard work.

teacher-appreciation-day-stickers-04.png

teacher-appreciation-day-stickers-03.png

teacher-appreciation-day-stickers-02.png

Teacher-appreciation-day-stickers-01.png

We’d love to know if you try out any of these ideas. Share your finished masterpieces with us on Twitter @texthelp or on our Facebook page. 

National Thank a Teacher Day is on 23rd June and is the perfect opportunity to thank a teacher in your life. We’ve put together some of the best ways to thank your teacher.

Celebrating National Thank a Teacher Day

What a year it's been for teachers! Adapting to new ways of teaching, juggling work and family life, dealing with constant uncertainty... the past twelve months have been a steep learning curve for educators everywhere. 

Wednesday 23rd June is National Thank a Teacher Day, and we think this is the perfect opportunity for students and parents to thank teachers for everything they do. We've put together some ideas for how you can thank your teacher, either remotely or in person. 

Assistive technology is quite an ambiguous term. The way modern technology has been applied across sectors is typically in a bid to assist the user – such as fintech-fuelled, one-click payments, or building-less neo-banks – in many ways.

Reverting to its origin, assistive technology in its very core form is technology designed to help people with specific needs in some way. An obvious use decades ago may have been support of certain disabilities with the likes of a mobility scooter or hearing aid.

Learning and communication disabilities, however, didn’t necessarily have a technological support system through which assistance could be provided 30+ years ago. Our CEO and founder Martin McKay discovered this first-hand in the early 80s when his father suffered a severe stroke. He was left unable to speak, read and write, which effectively gave him the inspiration to explore tech as a force for good from a young age.

Thankfully, society has since recognised the power of assistive technology in supporting learning and it has become highly regarded as a tool for special educational needs (SEN) learning within schools. Due to its enabling power, there’s room to explore its potential as the market, and user age of the user, grows.

Coming from a Northern Irish business, it hasn’t escaped my attention that the local education system has been challenged in the SEN area. Roughly one in five students across the country has special educational needs and an independent review of how the Education Authority supports those pupils has been declared. It’s easy to see how this issue can be amplified countless times on a global scale.

Yet, this predicament grows further still. The past year has made the potential of assistive technology, which can help with the likes of literacy, speech and writing, abundantly clear through the mass adoption of remote learning and home-schooling.

Learning loss is a regular occurrence during school holidays, but extended school closures meant that students went without the typical face-to-face, communication-driven routine their days are structured around and transformed their education process. While many studies have observed teens, the Education Endowment Foundation has revealed that reception-age children have been negatively impacted, with many more needing additional language support. Tech can assist here with simple tools such as subtitles which link language and voice together.

“The past year has made the potential of assistive technology, which can help with the likes of literacy, speech and writing, abundantly clear through the mass adoption of remote learning and home-schooling.”

Lockdown learning has meant that assistive technology isn’t (and wasn’t) just something isolated for SEN pupils, but broader education technology at large is in effect an assistive technology. This presented another challenge to overcome, since remote learning conditions weren’t always evenly distributed because this depended greatly on the individual circumstances of a student’s household. We know from our research that poorer students in the UK were unhappier during lockdowns than their wealthier peers, which aligns with the former having less access to technology. In a scenario where a SEN student may be from a lower income household, the problem can quickly escalate.

In observing the space through this lens, I want to flag that at no point do learning disabilities just stop overnight. So this is a message not just for educational institutions to take note of, but workplaces too, recognising that these pupils will grow into adults with similar, if not the same, learning challenges.

Nine is the average reading age in the UK and corporations should be mindful of this fact, not just in supporting staff, but in customer communication. The opportunity here lies in recognising the place of assistive tech as a tool to support with language barriers and promoting accessibility as standard, in turn creating an inclusive culture where teams can thrive while still protecting the bottom line.

Everyone has the right to understand and be understood, so businesses have a duty of care to recognise their employees are supported accurately. If schools and companies can collaboratively connect these dots, we can collectively work towards solving learning throughout entire lives – not just younger years.

Assistive technology can benefit every learner, not just SEN students

Once the domain of SEN learning, assistive technology is now for everyone

Assistive technology can benefit every learner, not just SEN students 

Assistive technologies empower all learners. This article was originally published in Education Technology on 12th June 2021. 

Blog

Building your brand via social media? How inclusive and accessible is your content?

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Once the domain of SEN learning, assistive technology is now for everyone

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