Cal Poly Humboldt social media is legally required to be accessible under federal, state, and California State University policy. 

Beyond the inclusion aspects, failure to make content accessible creates legal exposures for the University. 

Who this applies to:
In short, if it’s work-related on a University-affiliated account, it applies to you. This includes academic departments, administrators, faculty, and state-funded campus units. Clubs, auxiliaries, and volunteer organizations are still strongly encouraged to make posts accessible.

What that looks like: 
For publicly available digital content, this means that your video posts include accurate closed captions, images contain alt text metadata, and podcasts include transcripts. 

Why closed captions and alt text?
It’s the law, and it’s inclusive, but there are other benefits. Closed captions are likely to increase your video’s watchtime. Alt text and closed captions also make your posts easier to find by search engines. 

Closed Captions should be:

• included on all publicly-available posts.  
• completely accurate, including punctuation, grammar, and spelling. You will need to review and correct auto-generated captions.
• uploaded on platforms like Facebook and YouTube and ‘burned into’ Instagram Feed videos (example) until Instagram’s auto-captioning is up to legal standards. 

What is alt text? 
Alt text is metadata hidden inside an image that vision-adaptive software can relay to a user.  That software reads that data aloud to a user to help them understand what’s being conveyed.

Alt text should: 

• be a brief (<140 characters) explanation of essential information contained in the image. 
• be added manually, since auto-generated alt text is often too inaccurate to be helpful.
• not be part of the image’s caption (i.e.: “IMG DESC”) 

Can I still share posters and graphic designs on social media?
For these accessibility reasons, text-heavy posters on social media are strongly discouraged. Consider moving some of the words into a caption, or including a link to more detail. Beyond that, performance analytics suggest that algorithms downrank text-heavy images.  

So how do I make social media posts accessible? 
It depends on the platform, and is rapidly changing. We encourage you to do your best to make posts accessible whenever a platform’s functionality enables it. These links will help you:

• Add and edit and alt text on Instagram 
  
• Add and edit alt text on Facebook
• Add alt text on Twitter
• Edit closed captions on Youtube
• Upload closed captions for Facebook videos

We encourage you to explore Humboldt’s social media guidelines, which also cover:

• Tips for Cal Poly Humboldt video creators
• Copyright violations
• First amendment issues
• Consent & model releases
• Crisis communications best practices
• much more

This can be a confusing topic, particularly as laws are continually lagging behind rapidly-changing technology. If you have questions about social media best practices at Cal Poly Humboldt, please email socialmedia@humboldt.edu.