Social media gives organizations a low-cost opportunity to connect with their audience and attract new followers and supporters. However, people with disabilities can be unintentionally excluded from engaging with your social media content if accessibility isn’t taken into consideration when you create it.
Accessibility on social media isn’t about doing everything perfectly or becoming an expert overnight. It’s about building small, thoughtful habits into the way you create and share content. Simple actions—like writing meaningful alt text, choosing readable colors, and avoiding inaccessible formatting—can significantly improve the experience for many people.
Accessible content improves clarity overall. When your posts are easier to understand and navigate, they tend to work better for everyone—not just people who use assistive technology.
Learning Outcomes
- Understand what social media accessibility is and why it matters
- Learn simple, practical ways to make posts more accessible
- See how some social media trends make content inaccessible
Resources
The Accessible Social Video Lesson
(Accessible Social)
Alexa Heinrich, the founder of Accessible Social, dedicates her time to staying on top of accessibility in the social media space. Since this video is from 2022, some of the items she talks about have changed slightly in the different platforms, but the overarching concepts are still relevant. One note worth pointing out is that when she talks about hashtags, she says that this is camel case – #CamelCase. It is actually pascal case. Camel case would be #camelCase, where the first letter of the first word is lowercase and subsequent words begin with an uppercase letter.
Accessible Social Quick Guide
(Accessible Social)
The Accessible Social website is a one-stop shop to learn everything you want to know about social media accessibility. The Quick Guide is a good place to start on the site. You can learn the basics and then dive deeper into the subjects that you are interested in.
Accessible Social Guide Book
(Accessible Social)
This is a free downloadable guide book that brings together all of the key accessible social information into one reference. It’s a great accompaniment to the video lesson.