Accessibility and Social Media

While many organisations are somewhere along the path of making their website more accessible, this is often not the case for social media content. Being accessible on social media isn’t necessary to meet current guidelines and with the platforms being owned by external companies, organisations are limited in what they can do by the functionality of those platforms.

However, if you interact with your audience on social media channels, the benefits to you and them of being as accessible as possible are the same as any other platform. Over the past several years, social media platforms have greatly increased accessibility options available to their users.\

Six tips for making your social media content more accessible

• Add image descriptions: Describing photos, or putting alternative text (alt text), for people who are blind or partially sighted is important, as it allows them to build up a mental picture of what someone who is sighted is seeing automatically. How to add image descriptions on different social media platforms.

• Use CamelCase in hashtags: From Vocal Eyes Twitter thread: Write accessible hashtags. Capitalize Each Word, such as #ClapForOurCarers and #MeToo. Screen readers then read each word individually rather than as a long and incoherent string.

• Don’t overuse emojis: Text-to-speech software reads out a description for every single emoji which is used, so be careful with the amount of emojis you include.

Have you ever used a text-to-speech software? Discover how it works in the following video and pay special attention to how hashtags and emojis are read:

• Video audio-description: if the audio of your video doesn’t describe what is happening visually, you should consider adding a description of what happens in the video either as a follow-up post, or as part of the caption.

• Subtitles: Videos should have subtitles or captions where possible. This is not only beneficial for accessibility, but it also allows your videos to be viewed with the sound off:

• Keep alert for new accessibility features: regularly check for new accessibility features on the relevant platform(s) you use.

Time to Practice!