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Re: Embedding Social Media Best Practices

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From: glen walker
Date: Feb 7, 2020 11:05AM

Gian Wild from AccessibilityOz has spoken several times about the
accessibility of social media. There are two archived presentations from
her on https://www.accessibilityassociation.org/archivedwebinardirectory
(search for "social" on the page) but that requires IAAP membership to
watch them and I think it's about the accessibility of the various social
media platforms themselves rather than embedding them on your website.

She does have an article about embedding social media but it requires a fee
to access but might be worth it ($39). (The fee gives you access to lots
of articles, not just that one. Depending on your budget for the redesign,
an extra $39 out of your budget might be a drop in the bucket.)

https://www.accessibilityoz.com/products/ozwiki/social-media-embed-accessibility/

(I'm not affiliated with AccessibilityOz in any way. I just know Gian has
spoken about this topic several times so just wanted to pass along the
info.)

From my perspective, having social media embedded can be good or bad. They
often have infinite scrolling so you need a way to get out of the embedded
content or skip over it completely. Having a visually hidden "skip over"
link before the embedded content that lets you jump over the content would
be helpful. If you're feeling ambitious, a "skip over" link *after* the
embedded content can be helpful too if you are tabbing backwards through
the page.

You could also consider having a disclosure widget (
https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-practices/#disclosure) for the social media
content so the user has to expand the content to see it. That would make
tabbing over the content pretty easy (when it's collapsed).

You'd still have to consider providing a way to get out of the embedded
content if the user has tabbed significantly through the content. That is,
if I'm tabbing through the page and get to the social media content, then
start tabbing through the content, after I've gotten into it for a ways, I
might decide I want to get out. If it has infinite scrolling, then I can't
keep tabbing forward because I'll never reach the end. I could tab
backwards to retrace my steps but if I'm way into the content, that might
take a long time. At that point, having some kind of shortcut key to get
out of the content is a possibility, but shortcut keys are often hard to
discover. The user would have to be notified what the shortcut key is.
Maybe a note before the social media content. You can either implement
your own shortcut key (ctrl+<somekey>) or use the accesskey attribute.

You also run the risk of the social media content itself not being
accessible, but that's out of your control.

On Fri, Feb 7, 2020 at 7:15 AM <EMAIL REMOVED> <
<EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> Good Morning,
>
> I am helping implement accessibility features on a website redesign for my
> organization. They're wanting to embed social media content on the website
> homepage. Can you please direct me to WCAG guidance and/or accessibility
> best practices in this regard?
>
> Thank you in advance for your assistance.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Katie Frederick
> > > > >