The internet is a huge part of society today, which has become even more apparent with COVID-19. While the internet itself presents new information and opportunities, parts of the internet are not as accessible for people with different disabilities. The ways to make websites and social media more accessible sometimes involves a quick adjustment in how we post. Other times, more effort may be required to make things online accessible as some websites provide more accessibility than others- but the effort is important!
In this series, I will highlight ways you can be more accessible online today, making it as simple as possible. These changes could make the difference for people with disabilities so that they can be included in viewing and interacting with the content you put out online.
Image Descriptions
The first accessibility implementation I want to discuss are image descriptions. Image descriptions go in the text that comes along with a photo posted online. This helps people who use screen readers gain access to the information the photo is presenting.
On Instagram, I have seen and use “[Image description:…],” describing the important and relevant information in the picture. You don’t want to necessarily use a super long description, but having the text in the description allows for a longer description than alt text (which we will explore in a future blog post!) Image description is important to describe what an image is sharing as well as typing out text that is part of an image that a screen reader would not be able to read.
It only takes a couple more minutes to add an image description to the description of images on social media and makes your image more accessible! I have found that by typing image descriptions, it has allowed me to focus more on the purpose and intent of each social media post I make as well, making sure I am communicating what I want to be to people online.
Here is an example from Instagram:
Camel Case Hashtags
The hashtags in the example above are camel case hashtags. This is when you capitalize the beginning of each word in the hashtag. This not only #MakeThingsClear to read, but screen readers have an easier time reading the words when capitalized than when lower case. This is a quick adjustment to make the hashtags in your social media posts more accessible that takes very little time. My phone even has my most used hashtags saved with the capital letters.