Welcome to "Create Accessible Slack Posts." My name is Kristina England. I'm the Digital Accessibility Specialist for the President's Office, and I'll be conducting this training.
During this training, we'll go over the following topics. Why accessible Slack posts matter. Content best practices when posting to Slack. The importance of threads. And finally, the Slack accessibility checklist.
Now let's go over why accessible Slack posts matter. Several disability communities benefit from accessible Slack posts. Just like email, Slack is a vital form of communication for employees. It's used every day for team and project communications. Both employees with apparent and non-apparent disabilities benefit from accessible Slack posts, including threaded replies, descriptive links, and alt text for images and GIFs.
The great thing about Slack is Slack was designed with accessibility in mind. However, it's important to note that these features that I'm about to go over only go so far if you are not designing Slack content with accessibility in mind.
Here are some of the features that Slack provides. Zoom-- low vision users can use this feature to increase the size of text in the platform up to 200% Underline links-- colorblind and low vision users can use this feature to underline links in Slack posts. Animations-- the low vision, neurodivergent, and epilepsy, vestibular disorder, and motion sensitivity communities can use this feature to shut off all animations, including animated emojis and animated GIFs.
Keyboard shortcuts-- the blind, low vision, and mobility communities can use keyboard shortcuts to navigate the platform. Font-- users can change the font in Slack to a preferred readable font. And finally, color mode-- Anyone needing dark mode can customize their display.
Now let's go over content best practices in Slack. First, let's go over best practices for formatting a post. You should ensure you provide descriptive links when sharing links in your post. For example, call the link "Slack Best Practices" if you are sending someone to a Slack best practices article. Remove link previews when posting to reduce clutter and the length of the post, especially when posting multiple links.
Use built-in bulleted and numbered list styling to group ideas within your post. And finally, if your post is long and would require scrolling, consider breaking up the content into threaded responses. Longer content is harder to read in Slack, especially if it's long paragraphs of content and can be a lot for assistive technology users to get through based on Slack's post design.
Now I'll walk you through how to add bullets and a descriptive link in Slack when creating a post. I'm going to go ahead to my message field in the Slack accessibility training channel. And I'm going to go ahead and paste in a message. I'm going to do Command V because I'm on a Mac, but you could do Control V if you were on a Windows computer if you were copying the message in.
So I've copied the message in. It starts off with, "Reminder-- Here are some best practices to remember when formatting Slack posts." And then it has the three best practices under that. Those three best practices I want to go ahead and highlight. So one is ensure you provide descriptive links. And I'm going to go all the way down to the bottom because I have three items here.
And what you want to do is you want to look at your formatting menu within Slack for your message. If your formatting menu isn't appearing, go ahead and look for the formatting icon. So it's showing up as hide formatting for me. If I go ahead and select that, the formatting menu disappears. I can select Show Formatting to show the formatting menu. And I have bold, italics, strikethrough. I have the link option. And then I have ordered list and unordered list, which is the bulleted list.
I'm going to go ahead and select the bulleted list icon. And when I do that, I now have three bulleted items. And for a screen reader user, this would read each item as item one of three, item two of three, and item three of three. And so screen reader users would know that there are three items within the best practices.
Now I'm going to go ahead and also add a descriptive link. So in my first best practice, it says, "Ensure you provide descriptive links when sharing links in your post. For example, call the link 'Navigate Slack with your keyboard' if you are sending someone to a 'Navigate Slack with your keyboard' help article."
I'm going to go ahead and select Navigate Slack with your keyboard so I can add a hyperlink there. Going to go ahead and grab my hyperlink. So I'm going to go ahead off-screen. And again, you could grab the hyperlink by Command C within a Mac or Control C within Windows.
I'm now going to go ahead and look for my link icon. Go ahead and select that. And now a pop-up appears for adding a link. The text is "Navigate Slack with your keyboard" for the text field. And the link, I'm going to go ahead and Command V, or if you are on Windows, Control V.
And now I've pasted in the link for the article I want to send folks to. I'm going to go ahead and select Save in my Add link pop-up window. That pop-up window closes.
Another thing to note that I mentioned before is a link preview will appear. You can go ahead and remove that link preview from the Slack post to reduce clutter. I'm going to go ahead and remove that. And now my post is ready to be posted. So I'm going to go ahead and select the Send now button. And that is how you add bulleted list items, as well as a descriptive link, to a Slack post.
Let's talk about the difference between bulleted and numbered lists. You may be wondering why I used a bulleted list in my Slack post. Bulleted, or unordered lists, are used when the order of the items is not relevant. In the example I posted, the list was a list of best practices around formatting a post. Those best practices do not need to follow a specific order. Numbered, or ordered, lists convey a list of items that happen exactly in the order that's provided. Numbered lists should be used for step-by-step instructions or process flows.
When adding an image to your Slack post, make your images accessible with alternative text. When uploading an image to Slack, use the Edit file details link to add alt text through the description field.
The alternative text should be descriptive and meaningful. For example, I have an ice cream cone image on the right. The alt text I have on the slide is "a hand holding a scoop of vanilla ice cream in a cone. The ice cream is topped with an array of colorful sprinkles. The background is a blurred leafy green, indicating an outdoor setting."
Now let's walk through how to add alt text to an image in Slack. I'm going to go ahead and add a message in Slack. I'm going to say there is ice cream downstairs and add an exclamation mark. Then I'm going to look for the Attach button. Go ahead and select the Attach button.
When you do, you're going to find that there's several menu items to choose from in the dropdown. You're going to go ahead and select Upload from your computer. I'm going to then go ahead and navigate. In this case, I have stored my image in my Downloads folder. And I'm going to go ahead and select icecream.jpg.
Once I select icecream.jpg, it uploads to the message in Slack. I'm going to go ahead and select the image. And when I do, an icecream.jpg pop-up window opens. And what you want to look for is the Edit file details option. Go ahead and select that.
And I now have two fields, a file details pop up window with file name and the file name is icecream.jpg. And below that is the description field. And the description field is specifically for alt text. We're going to go ahead and add alt text. In this case, I'm going to go ahead and select Command V with my Mac. That would be Control V with a Windows computer.
In most cases, you'll be typing this in as you're adding the image. And you'll describe in as much detail what the image is trying to convey. So I've added the alt text I went over previously, "A hand holding a scoop of vanilla ice cream in a cone. The ice cream is topped with an array of colorful sprinkles. The background is a blurred leafy green, indicating an outdoor setting."
Once you've added your alt text, you can now select Save Changes. And then you'll be brought back to the icecream.jpg pop-up window. Go ahead and close that window. And even though you can't see it at the moment, there is going to be alt text for that image. I'm going to go ahead and send my post now, so I'm going to select the Send now button. Post that.
And the great thing about Slack is when my image is posted, an ALT button appears. When I go ahead and select that ALT button, I can view the alt text that I added to the image. That ALT button is available for everyone. Screen reader users will access the alt text behind the scenes in the code, but anyone can also look at that alt text to get a clearer definition of the image as well. And that's how you add alt text to an image in Slack.
Here are some things to consider when posting a GIF to Slack. An estimated 35% of adults over the age of 40 have a vestibular disorder. One in 26 people will develop epilepsy in their lifetime. Epilepsy, vestibular disorders, and general motion sensitivity can be triggered by digital animations, though not everyone with a vestibular disorder is impacted by animations, and the level of impact varies by person.
Motion-triggered health conditions include seizures, nausea, migraine headaches, vertigo, and potentially needing bed rest to recover. GIFs also can't be read by a screen reader, so just as with images, a description needs to be provided for screen reader users.
Let's talk about some best practices when posting a GIF to Slack. An important reminder that people who are aware that animations can trigger their health issues will have them shut off, but someone newly diagnosed may not know what can trigger their health condition. Keeping that in mind, do not use GIFs that pulsate, strobe, flash, or have jarring movements that would affect balance. If you are unsure if an animation can trigger a health condition, provide a warning and add the animation as a threaded response.
Finally, always post a description of the GIF for anyone using a screen reader or that has animation shut off. For example, I have a paused animation on the right in my description, for it is "Animation of a woman waving hello."
Here are some additional best practices to keep in mind when posting to Slack. When sharing documents on Slack, ensure they follow accessibility best practices. When sharing videos, try to share videos that include captions and a transcript.
When sharing event information, remember to post all the content as text in Slack instead of making the event information into an image-based flyer. Image-based posters are often a barrier to the dyslexic, blind, deafblind, and low vision communities. You can always provide a supplemental image to catch folks' eyes and draw them to key information about the event.
Now that we've talked about posting to Slack, I wanted to talk about replies and the importance of threads. Threaded discussions improve accessibility. When someone asks a question or posts a message that you want to respond to, the best way to respond is through the Reply in Thread feature.
This improves the overall experience for neurodivergent, low vision, and blind users. Neurodivergent employees do not have to worry about being distracted by Slack alerts that are not relevant to them. Blind and low vision employees do not receive constant alerts of new messages via their screen reader on conversations that are not relevant to them.
Threads reduce cognitive load for everyone. Threads improve the overall experience for anyone using Slack, as it reduces the number of notifications everyone receives and gives everyone the chance to opt in to discussions. To loop someone into a thread discussion that you feel should be participating, you can tag that person directly within the thread.
In addition, everyone benefits from the following aspects of threads. Threads organize the content so responses do not clutter up a channel. Replies are always attached to the original message, so the context is never lost. If you didn't have time to engage in the conversation at the time it was happening, you can easily catch up and respond within the context of the post.
Now let's go over how to create a thread within a post. And so what I'm going to do is this post actually doesn't have any threaded replies, so I'm going to be the first person to reply to this post. And this is the post that says, "Reminder-- Here are some best practices to remember when formatting Slack posts."
I'm going to go ahead and select the Reply in thread button. And once I do, I am brought directly to the post, and I have a Reply field. I'm going to go ahead and post a reply. "For more information about Slack accessibility, visit our Inclusive by Design website. And I'm just going to select "Inclusive by Design website" and go ahead and select the Link button and go ahead and add the link to the Inclusive by Design site within the Link field. I'm going to go ahead and save the link.
And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and select the Send now button to post the threaded reply. Now the post has one reply, and it has my reply to it. I can use the Back button to return to the main channel. And when I do, if I look at this post, it now shows as one reply, and I can view the thread.
And if I go to the one reply, and let's say you are the second person to reply to this thread, you would instead go right into the thread to read what other people have posted and then go ahead and reply to the threaded discussion. And so that's how you both start a thread and how you reply to a thread.
When using threads, do not use the Also send to channel feature. When you use this feature, it creates both a post in the channel and a threaded reply, defeating the purpose of using threads. The only time you should use this feature is if you have concluded a discussion and believe a final summary of the discussion is important to everyone in the channel. That final summary could then be sent to the channel while also keeping it in the thread for future reference.
You can leverage the Slack Accessibility Checklist after completing this training. You can save the Slack Accessibility Checklist as a favorite. We've created an interactive checklist on our Inclusive by Design site so you can reference it when posting to Slack. You can access the checklist through the LinkedIn Learning course now that you have completed the video portion of this training.
Thank you so much for completing the "Create Accessible Slack Posts" training. Once you're done with this video, do not forget to mark it as complete in LinkedIn Learning, and also a reminder to mark any resources as complete within your learning path. Thank you so much!