Creating Safer Content
I create a lot of content online through my social media platforms, mostly LinkedIn. My content usually revolves around psychological safety, mental health, identities, intersectionality and my personal experiences. I put a lot of love and care into the content I create and would like to share some things with y’all so you can do the same.
Accessibility
There are a lot of ways to make your social media content more accessible but today I’ll only be breaking down captions, hashtags and descriptions.
Hashtags
Ellen Wagner (She/Her/Hers) created an amazing slide deck on why you should use CamelCase for writing hashtags.
She explains that for people with dyslexia or other learning disabilities hashtags that are written in camelcase are easier to understand because the ending of each word is more clear and therefore easier to read. Moreover, Screen readers read every word out loud. If the word is structured by capitalized letters in between, the screen reader makes it sound more like an actual phrase instead of a fast sequence of words. Therefore using CamelCase is a great way to make your feed more accessible to your blind followers and people with vision impairment or low vision.
Captions
I use Instagram to caption most of my short videos. It’s free, easy to use and I’m able to download the videos with captions to redistribute to my other platforms.
Jazzmyne (She/Her) created an amazing tutorial on how to caption your Reels and stories.
Descriptions
Descriptions whether for videos or images are a must when creating content online. I’m able to add my descriptions in the body of my captions on Instagram and in the comments of my posts on LinkedIn. I have not figured out how to do it on my TikTok and Youtube yet but I’m working on it.
More on descriptions and overall accessibility in your content can be learned with Kelly Bron Johnson (She/They) in this extremely insightful video.
Pronouns
Whenever introducing a new person to my audience or followers, whether it be in writing or speech, I include their pronouns. This allows the audience to use correct pronouns when continuing the conversation and prevents the person I’m speaking of from unintentional harm.
As exampled here when I introduce Xin Yi Yap (She/Her) to my audience for the first time in this conversation.
Preventative Measures
Anything you can do to prevent harm being done in your space should be done. Taking ownership of your space means being very clear of will and will not be tolerated and the culture being upheld there.
A great example of this is this post by thedailyqueers where they breakdown ways to explicitly state the tone being used in their space.
This is so important especially in a space dedicated to people who are more likely to be harmed than others. Safer spaces are possible even online and I hope one day we all strive to create them.
Thank you for reading through! Hi, I’m K Mataōtama Strohl (They/Them). I’d love to be able to continue to share stories like this but I need your help to be able to do so. Please visit my Ko-Fi page to tip what you can and gain access to my other work. You can learn more about me and my work at the link below.
