Accessibility in digital spaces is a legal obligation for many organisations and an ethical responsibility for all of them. Yet social media accessibility remains poorly understood and inconsistently practised. A post that looks polished to a sighted user with a fast connection may be entirely inaccessible to someone who is blind, deaf, or navigating with assistive technology. Addressing this is not complex, but it does require deliberate habits.

Alt Text For Images

All major social platforms now allow or require users to add alternative text to images. Alt text is a written description of an image that screen readers convey to users who cannot see the image. Without it, a visually impaired person encounters a blank or an automated, often inaccurate, description.

Writing good alt text means describing the content and context of an image concisely and accurately. It is not a caption, a keyword list, or a place for marketing messages. It is a practical description that enables someone who cannot see the image to understand what it shows. ‘A woman presenting a slide about climate data to a conference audience’ is good alt text. ‘Photo’ is not.

Captions On Video Content

Video without captions excludes deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers, as well as the large proportion of users who watch without sound in public spaces. Accurate captions — not auto-generated ones uncorrected for errors — make video content usable by a much wider audience.

Several platforms generate automatic captions that are often surprisingly accurate but still benefit from manual review. Correcting errors before publishing takes only a few minutes and makes a significant difference. For brands publishing significant volumes of video, captioning should be a non-negotiable step in the production workflow.

Emoji And Hashtag Accessibility

Emoji are read aloud by screen readers, which means a string of celebratory emojis at the start of a post becomes a lengthy verbal description before the actual text is reached. Using emoji sparingly and placing them at the end of posts, rather than at the beginning or throughout, improves the experience for screen reader users significantly.

Hashtags should be written in CamelCase — capitalising the first letter of each word — so that screen readers can parse them correctly. #socialmediamarketing and #SocialMediaMarketing are identical visually, but the latter is read intelligibly by assistive technology while the former is often rendered as an unintelligible string of characters. WebAIM provides detailed guidance on these and other social media accessibility practices for content creators.

Plain Language And Readability

Accessibility also encompasses cognitive accessibility — making content easy to understand for people with learning differences, those reading in a second language, or simply anyone encountering your content while distracted. Short sentences, plain language and clear structure improve comprehension for all readers.

Jargon, excessive abbreviations and overly complex sentence structures all create unnecessary barriers. If a post can be rewritten in plainer language without losing meaning, it almost always should be.

Building Accessibility Into Your Process

The simplest way to make accessibility a consistent practice is to integrate it into your content production workflow rather than treating it as an afterthought. Reliable social media management from a company like 99social builds these standards in systematically, ensuring every post reaches the widest possible audience.

Accessible social media is not a niche concern. It is simply good communication practice — and increasingly, it is expected.