How to Make Your Social Media Accessible
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Graphic with Facebook and twitter icon with text “How to make your social media accessible by world services for the blind
Accessibility in websites has become a huge topic within the last year due to news articles and social media. But what about making your social media posts accessible? It is not as hard as you would think. There is so much assistive technology available to help those who are visually impaired and blind already but making a few small tweaks to your social media posts can make them accessible to a much wider audience!
Add Image Descriptions
Image descriptions provide screen reader users image descriptions so they can navigate a website without losing any information. Image descriptions (alt text) are almost always at the forefront of accessibility on the web. It's basic web practices to add them to your website but they can often be overlooked on social media. But they are incredibly easy to add! Image descriptions need to be provided for any kind of image, whether it’s a graphic, a photograph, or an image with text on it!
Here are ways to add image descriptions to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Linkedin:
Facebook: On Facebook when you upload a photo, click on “edit photo”. From there you will be able to add a description of photo.
LinkedIn: When you upload an image to your feed, at the top right of the image you can add the image description by clicking “Add Description”.
Twitter: In twitter click on the more icon and select Settings and Privacy. From there, go to the accessibility tab and select the checkbox that says "Compose image descriptions" Once this checkbox has been selected you can add image descriptions to any image you add to twitter.
Instagram: When uploading and image, go to “Advanced Settings” at the bottom of the upload screen. From there the last option is “Add Alternate Text”. Another way is to add Alt text at the end of your image caption.
Contrasting Colors
For low vision users, colors with similar contrast can be difficult to see (think white writing on yellow background, white writing on light pink, etc) and with Instagram's newest feature, Instagram Stories, many of them cannot be read because the text does not have high enough contrast. So make sure your text has high contrast so low vision users can read it easily.
Add Subtitles
Subtitles on videos are vital for the hard of hearing and deaf community. Adding subtitles and captions can provide accessibility to an even wider audience that would be missing out on your videos otherwise! For Instagram stories, Clip-o-matic is a great app that provides the captions for you on Instagram.
Transcribe screenshots, memes, and GIFS
This tip goes back to adding image descriptions to posts. Screen readers such as JAWS and NVDA cannot detect text in a shared screenshot, meme, or a GIF (for example, the graphic on this post!) so make sure when you are adding descriptions of the text in images to your image description.
No Need to Overuse Emojis
The same emoji over and over again can be very repetitive when using a screen reader. Make sure you limit your emoji use to only one or two to get your point across.
Capitalize words in Hashtags
Another screenreader tip - to make your hashtags accessible to screen readers (and easier to read for low vision users) make sure you capitalize words in every hashtag. For example, #worldservicesfortheblind would become #WorldServicesForTheBlind, which makes the hashtag much easier to read and screen readers can detect them as separate words.
If you have any more tips, feel free to let us know in the comments.
If you have any questions, feel free to Contact Us!
