10 Tips To Make Your Social Media Content More Accessible

Around a billion people worldwide have a disability. That's 15% of the global population. If you're not creating inclusive content, you could be missing out on the potential to convert millions into an engaged community.

Ahead of International Day of Persons with Disabilities on 3 December, here are 10 easy tips for making your content more accessible. Thinking about accessibility is good for inclusion and good for business – it produces content that improves user experience for clients and stakeholders, and the performance of brand, communications, marketing and sales.

The list is far from exhaustive. You can join the discussion by using the hashtag #AccessibilityForAll on LinkedIn and add your ideas too!

Be concise, and use short, simple sentences. If you need to use technical jargon, explain it! You want your content to be as clear as possible for people to easily process it.
Spell out your acronyms the first time you use them.
Capitalise hashtags for readability, for example: #AccessibilityForAll. This is known as Camel Case and helps screen readers more easily distinguish between the different words in the hashtag.
Use clear call to actions to signpost your readers to other content. Good examples include "Find out more", "Contact us", "Subscribe"
When producing content with an audio element (for example, videos and podcasts), make sure you have a written transcription or subtitles added. Some social media platforms already have automatic captioning and text-to-speech features.
Add alternative text to your images – this provides screen readers and people using assistive tech to 'read' your images.
Use numbered or bulleted lists to display information, as these are easier to scan and comprehend than blocks of text.
Use emojis wisely – adding them to social media posts is a good way to spice content up, but try not to overuse them, as audio descriptions are assigned to each emojis.
Avoid relying on colour or fonts to define the meaning of something – instead use visual cues, such as exclamation marks!
Never stop learning: Accessibility has resulted in enormous progress. The touch screen, the electric toothbrush, and subtitles were all originally invented to help disabled people.

Check in with colleagues and friends with a disability to learn and understand more about what works best, and the chances are you'll be improving user experience for everyone at the same time!

Emily Hier leads on social media at Clifford Chance and has been at the firm since 2017. She is partially deaf and also co-chairs the firm's award-winning affinity network for disabled and neurodiverse colleagues.

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