since lowering the net is all about accessibility, we’ve compiled some references and recommendations to allow people to read your work with ease!

alt text

we highly encourage you to add alt text to the images you post. alt text is included in the code of images on websites, so that blind people and other people using screen readers can still see the information that’s in them.

here’s a link about how to do that on twitter, and here’s a guide to good alt text. for poetry purposes, just remember to paste the entire poem into the alt text field on twitter. you don’t need to do anything else! if you’re interested in viewing alt text on twitter or using a screen reader to see how your tweets look for someone using them, there’s a guide here.

twitter has a 1,000-character limit on alt text per image, so for poems longer than that, we would recommend using more than one image when posting. another option is linking to a publicly accessible google doc, tumblr post, or another accessible version. if you aren’t already writing using a program with a built-in word counter, this website is a good option for checking your character count.

a special alt text note for poetry: linebreaks aren’t always saved in alt text, so you may need to put in slashes or other punctuation depending on your platform. however, it looks like twitter preserves linebreaks, so we might be safe there!

image composition

it’s important to keep images readable! using a contrast checker can help you confirm that your text and background have enough contrast for people with visual impairments. this also helps keep things readable on smaller screens, for people with dyslexia, and in general! avoid compositions where your text sits on top of an image with so much detail or contrast that it makes text hard to read. 

consider mobile viewers when composing your images; square or portrait can still be read on desktop, whereas landscape can be really hard on mobile. (of course, sometimes your poem just is landscape by nature, and that’s fine, too!)

check out this guide on best practices for twitter image sizes. images that are vertically longer (and get cropped on a tweet preview) can still be easily read on mobile when enlarged. 

other notes

here’s some more general accessibility tips: avoid “special fonts” that allow you to use bold, italic or other formatted text on twitter. those are not roman letters and will not be read as words. they are math symbols and will be read out one at a time as math symbols with names that are often many seconds long. this can make twitter very unusable for people using screen readers, especially if they are put in display names.

also, avoid using super long strings of emojis for the same reason above. “smiling face with tear” read out loud once, or even four times, is fine. putting twenty in a row can waste time.

be sure to browse through the rest of the pages on our website for other resources as well as guidelines & faqs! we’re so excited to be creating with you this july!