Making Your Social Media Content More Accessible

Why accessible content is good business, not just good manners

Around one in five people in the UK lives with some form of disability, and a large share of those are your potential customers, followers and clients. If your updates assume everyone can see a crisp image, hear a video clearly and read tiny grey text, you are quietly turning people away. The good news is that the fixes are simple, free and quick, and they often improve your content for everybody.

Accessibility is not a separate marketing project. It is a handful of small habits you build into the way you already post. Below are the practical changes that make the biggest difference for a sole trader or small team with limited time.

Write image descriptions that actually describe the image

Most social platforms let you add a text description to a photo, usually called alt text. This is read aloud by screen readers, so it is the difference between a blind follower hearing a useful detail or hearing nothing at all.

• Be specific about what matters. "New arrival" tells nobody anything. "Handmade navy leather notebook with a brass clasp on a pale oak desk" paints the picture.
• Skip the words "image of". Screen readers already announce that it is a picture. Start with the content instead.
• Keep it around 125 characters where the platform limits you, and put the most important detail first in case it gets cut off.
• Describe text inside images. If your graphic contains a quote, a price or a date, type that wording into the description or repeat it in the caption. A picture of a poster is invisible to someone who cannot see it.
• Decorative images need nothing. If a photo is purely stylistic and adds no meaning, leave it empty rather than writing filler.

If your platform has no alt text field, put a short description at the top of the caption in square brackets. It looks deliberate and your audience will understand.

Choose fonts, sizes and colours people can actually read

Stylish graphics often fail basic legibility. A few rules will keep your posts readable without making them look plain.

• Use a clean, plain font for body text on graphics: a simple sans-serif with clear letter shapes beats a decorative script every time. Save the fancy font for a logo only.
• Go bigger than feels necessary. Text that is comfortable on your laptop is usually too small on a phone. Aim for type that is still readable when the image is the size of a thumbnail.
• Check your contrast. Pale yellow on white, or grey on light grey, disappears for many people. Dark text on a light background, or light text on a genuinely dark background, is the safe route.
• Do not rely on colour alone. If a chart shows good and bad results in red and green, add labels or patterns too, because red-green colour blindness is common.
• Avoid cramming. Three short lines on a graphic will always outperform a paragraph squeezed into a square.

Caption your videos and add subtitles

A huge amount of social video is watched with the sound off, in a bus queue or a quiet office. Captions help viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing, and they also rescue everyone else in a noisy or silent setting.

• Turn on automatic captions, then correct them. Auto-captions are a useful starting point but they mangle names, places and technical terms. Spend two minutes tidying them before you publish.
• Add subtitles to the video itself rather than relying only on a caption file, so they appear wherever the clip is shared.
• Keep captions on screen long enough to read. One or two lines at a time, with a clear outline or background so they stand out against the footage.
• Describe important sounds. If a doorbell, alarm or laugh matters to the story, note it in the captions.
• Say what you show. When you demonstrate a product on camera, mention out loud what you are doing, so the information is not locked into the visuals alone.

Make your written posts easier to scan

Captions and comments deserve the same care as your graphics. Long, unbroken blocks of text are hard work for readers with dyslexia, low vision or simply a busy day.

• Write hashtags in CamelCase. #SmallBusinessTips is far easier to read and to hear from a screen reader than #smallbusinesstips.
• Do not go overboard with emoji. A couple add warmth; a string of them between every word makes the text sound like noise when read aloud.
• Break text into short paragraphs and use plain words where you can. Clear beats clever.
• Put key information in the caption, not only in the image. That way it is searchable, copyable and readable by everyone.

Build it into your routine

None of this needs a new workflow. Before you hit publish, run through four questions: does every meaningful image have a description, is the text big and contrasty enough, do the videos have checked captions, and are the hashtags readable? That takes under a minute once it becomes habit.

You will not get every post perfect, and that is fine. Accessibility is a direction of travel, not a test you pass once. Start with the content you post most often, improve one habit at a time, and your updates will reach more people, hold attention longer and represent your business the way you would want it to.