How to Make Your Website and Social Media More Accessible

October is Blindness Awareness Month and we think that’s a great time to highlight the ways in which you could make your marketing efforts more accessible to the visually impaired patrons in your community. According to the CDC, 61 million adults in the United States live with a disability and of that number, 4.6% suffer from a vision impairment. By making a few of the below adjustments to your website and social media posts, your content can become easier to access and consume for everyone!

Graphics & Video

No matter where you post a photo or a graphic, make sure you’re including a descriptive caption and alternative text (alt text) for those who are using screen readers. Any platform will have this option before publishing, but some are trickier than others to find. On your website, this can be done through alt tags. On Facebook there’s an option for custom alt text. On Instagram you’ll have to scroll down in the post window to “advanced settings” to find this option, and on Twitter you’ll be able to add a description. Descriptions should be clear and to the point about what the photo conveys. You don’t need to say “image or photograph of” for a screen reader because they already relay that it’s an image. In video, if you’ve included a lot of text or presentation slides, make sure it also has a voiceover to narrate anything that’s shown on screen.

Decoding Copy

When writing copy (following our guide to avoid common copywriting mistakes, of course) it’s important to think about how this copy will be read aloud through a screen reader. Keep writing simple, using vocabulary that can be found in the dictionary and avoiding any abbreviations. Don’t overuse emojis in captions on social media and when you do choose to use one, make sure you look up how it will be translated to the spoken word so you’re conveying the right message to your reader. When adding hashtags to a post, always use camel case, which is capitalizing the first letter of each word. For example, #BlindnessAwarenessMonth rather than #blindnessawarenessmonth. Avoid any special characters in text and be sure to have legible fonts and adequate font sizes on all social media posts as well as on your website.

Accessibility Tools

That may seem like a lot of things to consider as you’re creating content or updating your website, but the great news is there are a number of tools that are helpful in checking all of these factors for you to guarantee you’re sharing content that’s accessible to everyone. WAVE is a free browser extension that will assess your website and its content for accessibility. Contrast Checker allows you to drag and drop an image to find out what the contrast is before uploading. Color Oracle is a color blindness simulator so you can better understand how colors are coming across and not rely on color to send a message. Using this text on background image a11y check, you can see how legible your text is. NVDA is a free screen reader for Windows that can be downloaded so that you can see how text and alt text will be read aloud by a screen reading program. If you ever have any questions about web accessibility, feel free to refer to the guidelines that have set the standard for making content accessible. Being inclusive in your marketing content matters, but not everyone gets it right on the first try. As long as you learn from any mistakes you’ve made and are open to feedback from patrons, you’ll create a more positive and accepting environment when it comes to digitally serving your community.

And remember…if you, or someone you know, is not able to read a book (due to a visual impairment, reading disability, or brain injury) or cannot turn the pages of a book (due to a physical impairment), the New Jersey State Library’s Talking Book and Braille Center is here to help!