Social media has surged over the past few years, and also the importance of accessibility online has grown with it.
We outline what accessibility is and why you must implement it into your social media strategy. Additionally, we break down some quick and straightforward ways to create your posts more accessible. Let’s dive in!
What is Accessibility and Why Is It Important?
Accessibility refers to the practice of creating products, services, or environments available to as many of us as possible, especially those with disabilities. On social media, this implies that somebody with a disability should be ready to “access” your content as effectively as someone without a disability.
Accessibility online is specially intended to assist people that depend upon assistive technologies to use social media. this might include those that are blind or visually impaired, people that are deaf or have a hearing impairment, and folks with dyslexia or cognitive learning disabilities.
Why accessibility may be a smart business decision:
36 million are considered blind, and also the remaining 217 million have moderate to severe visual disorder. Additionally, 466 million people have disabling hearing disorders. That’s over 5 percent of the world’s population!
Considering just the sheer number of individuals with hearing impairment or a visible impairment, it’d be a slip to not make your social media posts as accessible as possible. Widening the range of individuals who can understand your content means reaching more potential customers, which is great for your business. It also improves SEO and shows your followers that you just are committed to inclusion.
Why accessibility is that the right thing to do:
Aside from it being a strategic business move, accessibility is solely the proper thing to try and do. Making small adjustments to your posts can mean a world of difference to someone who is employing a screen-reader or another assistive technology to browse social media. Becoming more accessible may be a sign of reference to people with disabilities, and it ensures that each one people are ready to share and interact together with your posts.
How to Make Your Posts Accessible
1. Add Closed Captions.
For people with deafness, closed captioning is important to their understanding of videos. to not be confused with subtitles, which offer text for the dialogue in an exceeding video, closed captioning includes both spoken words and other relevant sounds. Closed captioning is additionally helpful for viewers whose linguistic communication is different from the one employed in the video. Furthermore, 85 percent of video on Facebook is played without sound, so even those without deafness appreciate closed captioning.
Facebook and YouTube are auto-generating video captions for a pair of years now. Instagram recently unrolled auto-captioning for IGTV and Instagram Live (not for Stories), and Twitter claims to be functioning on it. While auto-generated captions aren’t available on all platforms yet, most of the main social media sites allow you to upload an.SRT file so you’ll be able to provide captions yourself.
2. Include Alternative Text.
The alternative text could be a short, detailed description of what’s shown in a very particular photo. it’s considered to incorporate alternative text for each image in order that people using screen readers are ready to know what’s happening within the picture.
All of the most important social platforms allow you to feature in an alternate text when posting a picture. On Facebook, start a post and click on the “Edit” button within the top left corner of your photo. Instagram’s “Alt Text” feature will be found under “Advanced Settings” which appears after you are preparing to share a post. LinkedIn’s “Alt Text” button appears within the top right corner of any image you upload, and Twitter’s “Add Description” option shows up directly below your photo when creating a tweet. the method is very easy, and it really helps to enhance accessibility!
3. Capitalize Your Hashtags.
One of the only ways to enhance accessibility is by capitalizing the primary letter of every word when employing a hashtag, also called using “CamelCase.” When people use screen readers, the software often reads out uncapitalized hashtags as a string of letters instead of as individual words.