• Accessibility

    📝 On Hashtag Accessibility

    I’m calling myself out for this because until about a month ago, I used hashtags all wrong on my social media posts.

    You can make your posts easier with screen readers with a tiny change:

    Capitalize the first letter of each word in your hashtag

    Plus some benefits:

    • Friendlier for screen readers

    • Friendlier for people with dyslexia or cognitive disabilities

    Via Make Your Hashtags Accessible, which I shared again this morning, and it prompted me to write this up.

    Technically, this is Pascal’s case vs. Camel’s case, but either one is better than the lowercase.

    As someone with dyslexia, I understand that it’s more of a spectrum than a blanket, ‘Jeff is bad with numbers,’ so it varies. I do find it easier to read something like DjangoConUS vs. djangoconus, which reads like “django conus” to me instead of “django con us.” So maybe that is my dyslexic brain, but I suspect it’s easier for people who have no clue what a DjangoCon is, either.

    One more resource worth reading is Hashtag Accessibility, by Everyone for Everyone, which has a nice tl;dr heading of “Just Be Kind: Use Accessible Hashtags."

    Tuesday May 14, 2024