Why make social media posts accessible?
Whether you are posting on your personal social media account, for a professional organization, or for a student group, the goal is to reach your audience and share your message.
According to the American Foundation for the Blind, 26.9 million American adults report having some form of vision loss; an additional 37.5 million American adults report some trouble hearing, according to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. These statistics do not take into account the millions of others who are impacted by other conditions that impact the ability to read or view social media posts – like Dyslexia or Color Blindness. That is over 65 million Americans who may not be able to fully interact with your social media post if it isn’t properly accessible.
How to create accessible social media posts
Unfortunately, we are somewhat limited in how accessible we can make our social media posts because much of it depends on the accessibility of the underlying platform. We can’t edit the underlying HTML the way we can with our own websites and documents.
In recent years, the major social media platforms, like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram have made efforts to make their platforms more accessible. It is up to us to take advantage of those features consistently in order to ensure that our social media posts are as accessible as possible.