Great thread on how science communicators can make their content more accessible!

I would like to add some things I've learned, primarily from the #DisabledInSTEM community. I'm still learning and unlearning; constructive feedback is welcome.

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[Quoted Tweet below] https://twitter.com/this_is_farah/status/1358100524021788674

Listen to disabled people! A lot of resources are written by abled folks, and completely disregard the lived experiences of disabled people.

Some accounts I follow:

@DisabledStem
@DisInHigherEd
@DisVisibility
@AccessUc
@Ava_Nicole23
@may_gun
@nolan_syreeta

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I'll say it again: caption your videos! Here's a great exemplification of why captions matter. Hearing and seeing people, can you understand this video? Do you recognize how hard it is to read lips?

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[Quoted Tweet below] https://twitter.com/Freelove19xx/status/1357429922533412868

Automated captions are error-prone, Eurocentric and ableist. Correct your auto captions. If you're organizing a panel, budget for a human transcriber. I need to do better too. Look up #Craptions and read below to learn more.

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[Quoted Tweet below] https://twitter.com/Leigh_Ann_Cowan/status/1274850088913952768

Stop replacing half your sentence with emojis y'all. When you select emojis on browser, the text you see is the text the screen reader sees.

Experiment time!

Download and try it for yourself http://nvaccess.org/download 

How does this ?
Let's get theand beat the

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Sometimes emojis do work as intended.

Try this:

This Tweet is

An aside: As a seeing person, I don't always understand wtf the emojis are supposed to mean either, but maybe that's just me

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You may have noticed I'm writing "quoted Tweet below" whenever I quote Tweet. This helps indicate that you're referring to a quoted Tweet that should be clicked on. You could use emojis, but these may not work as intended.

How does this sound?
Or this?

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Write your hashtags in camel case. What's that? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camel_case 

I mean it. Time for a second experiment.

Go to http://nvaccess.org/download  or use your phone's text-to-speech function if you have that.

Compare #scicomm and #scicomm.

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The goal of #SciComm is to make science accessible to all! You should be doing these things regardless, but if it helps convince you, know that these practices make your content more accessible for abled folks too.

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Educators, let's teach these practices! @LUSciComm @nomencultured @SciCommTrainers

Practitioners, let's commit to learning and educating our community! @this_is_farah @AlexGelle @EoloSon

P.S. - Follow @DisInHigherEd and celebrate Black disabled folks, always.

/end