3 ways to make your firm’s social media more accessible

Written by Caitlin Roxburgh

Last year, we suggested a few different ways to make your firm’s online presence more accessible for your audience. Now we’re adding to this by looking at a few ways in which you can make your social media accessible for everyone.

Watch your language

Starting off simple, you need to make sure that your copy is plain text. Keep it short, concise and snappy so that both those in and outside your industry can understand your message without all the jargon.

You also need to make sure you are using person-first language when speaking about people with disabilities. Nobody wants to be labelled as only one thing, especially when that label is one that results in discrimination.

Be consistent

Making sure that your post is accessible goes further than your wording, it stretches to your imagery and your hashtag use as well.

You can help people who use page readers by adding alternative text to your social media, specifically, you should start any alternative text with “photograph shows…” This indicates to screen readers and those using them about what is being shown.

Adding alternative text to your images helps people who use page readers on social media, starting all captions with “photograph shows” so that it indicates visual media rather than a continuation of the text.

To help page readers further, you can also make sure that they recognise your hashtags as separate words. Hashtags that have multiple words need to have each word capitalised to avoid them being pronounced as one long line of nonsense.

If we return to the written content of your posts, then it’s worth mentioning that those fancy fonts that look great, are completely invisible to page readers. So, it may look fantastic to the majority, but for some, they’re literally missing half your point.

A picture says a 1000 words

It’s a saying because it’s true.

But it only gets your word count up when your audience can see these images. So making sure that the colours used have a good contrast are key. You can find guides online to help make sure that those with colour blindness, or who are partially blind can view your full post.

Once everyone can view your content, make sure that what they’re viewing shows the full spectrum of your audience. Try to be inclusive in your imagery and make sure that you’re imagery isn’t offensive or exclusionary.

Above all, what keeps your social media presence inclusive is regular audits to make sure that you are incorporating best practices across all your posts and platforms.

If you need any help reviewing your content’s accessibility, get in touch with us today.