#8: It was a good week
Time is a very strange thing. I fully expected last week to feel horrible, especially considering it was the one-year anniversary of COVID-19 being declared a pandemic.
But it actually didn’t feel too terrible. Somber, but not awful. My 30th birthday on Wednesday probably had a lot to do with it, but it was more than just that, which is why instead of one accessibility win and one accessibility fail this week, you’re getting three wins. It just felt right.
Here’s to hoping this coming week feels just as good for everyone.
Alexa
Digital Accessibility Wins of the Week
Win #1: IKEA’s Audio Catalog
IKEA has turned its famous catalog into an audio book and it’s a whopping four hours long. The retailer recently announced that it would no longer be printing the book, and has instead made it available online in addition to the audio format. You can listen to the full audio catalog on IKEA’s YouTube channel.
Win #2: Twitter Audio Transcriptions
Audio transcriptions are coming to Twitter Fleets and voice tweets and hopefully soon! Twitter has made no secret about its desire to become a more accessible platform, so this is promising news as the platform continues to roll out new features.
Win #3: Instagram Story Captions
Instagram is finally giving users the ability to caption their story videos directly in the app. My feature—which is still being tested internally—was accidentally leaked last week and discovered by industry leader Matt Navarra.
Have you recently spotted a major digital accessibility win or fail on social media? Send it to me! I might just feature it in my next newsletter. Feel free to email me at hello@therealalexa.com or you can DM me on Twitter. My inbox is always open!
You Should Retweet This
This was exceptionally disheartening to read. Thousands of Americans are dead due to government failure and we can’t even make vaccine roll-out websites accessible for blind and visually-impaired users? Absolutely disgraceful.
Word of Advice
Make your memes accessible, please. This means adding alt text to your images and making sure your written content is formatted in a way that a screen reader user can access and understand it. I’ve seen a number of text-based memes that use excessive spacing and hard returns to make text appear as if it’s over a specific image. Don’t do this. A screen reader consumes copy left to right (for left to right languages), so it’s not going to recognize your multiple spaces as an improvised column gutter.
Check out my below thread on accessible memes to learn more and copy some pre-written alt text for a couple of memes that are trendy right now.
Looking for an easy way to double-check your social media content before posting it? Download my handy checklist and make sure you always have the basics of digital accessibility for social media covered!
One Last Thing
This entire thread is beautiful.
Secrets, secrets are no fun unless you share with everyone! This logic also applies to newsletters and your Netflix login.