Accessibility on social media and what you can do
So, you’ve spent ages writing that perfect post and are ready to post it out on your social media channels, but have you considered if your post is accessible to all audiences?
There are a number of things you can do to help this, which will make a big difference to people who may otherwise struggle to access your posts, such as those who are visually impaired and use a screen reader
Write your hashtags in Camel Case
Camel case is where you capitalise the first letter of each new word. When using hashtags, some people may put ‘#digitalmarketingblopost’ but using camel case, this would become ‘#DigitalMarketingBlogPost’
Why is this important you ask? Without camel case, screen readers are unable to identify the individual words, so it can often just sound like a blur of letters, making it difficult for people to differentiate between the different words.
Using camel case is also a huge benefit to anyone who has challenges identifying patterns in written words, and the relationship between those words.
Add subtitles to videos
A lot of accessibility on social media issues lie around videos. If you are sharing videos on your social media including aspects with people speaking, adding subtitles to the video is a must!
Without them, people who are deaf or hard of hearing will be unable to understand what is happening in the video.
This is just as important on things like stories, as well as video posts.
Instagram has also recently introduced a feature for their stories, producing automated subtitles for you. Find out more about it here.
Don’t use weird fonts
You may have seen people using different fonts on their social media accounts, such as in their Instagram bios, but this is something that you want to avoid.
If you use a mixture of fonts, you can confuse screen readers.
Screen readers are very literal and read what is shown to them, based on what is coded. These fonts you may see on Instagram for example, aren’t actually typefaces but are
instead scripts that resemble letters, so are read like ‘mathematical script small c’ – and that’s just one letter! Now imagine it for a whole word or sentence!
Add image descriptions
If someone can’t view an image, they should be able to access the information that the image holds in another way. That’s where image alt text comes in. You may remember us mentioning it in our ……………… blog post here, but image alt text is as important on social media.
In the alt text box, put a brief description of the image that helps describe it to someone who can’t see the image.
Don’t go crazy with emojis
We all love using emojis, but sometimes adding too many can do more harm than good!
Screenreaders reads the images out loud for people who can’t see them. So for example, this 😴 is read as ‘sleeping face’. Now you can imagine lots of these would make it quite difficult for someone to hear the important information.
This text:
We have a new member of staff joining us today 🙌 🎉 😀 👩💻 🍸 how exciting is that!?
Would become:
We have a new member of staff joining us today raising hands party popper grinning face woman technologist cocktail glass how exciting is that!?
Want to learn more about tips to improve your social media, get in touch with our Digital Marketer Danni.
