Social media is a growing aspect of communicating with audiences. By designing accessible communications into your campaigns, you embed good practices and will engage more people across all platforms.
Creating accessible social media content shares a lot of good practice with creating accessible content in other forms, but there are additional things to think about when publishing content to social media platforms.
This fundamentals guide is a quick reference tool to share six core considerations when creating accessible social media content. Keep these on hand when writing your own content, share these with colleagues, or even embed them into social media policies at your organisation.
We also have other useful resources including:
- Accessible social media creation and posting checklists
- Social media, regulations and your responsibilities
1. Write in plain English
Consider your writing style and how it might be experienced by those with dyslexia or other learning difficulties. The aim of writing in plain English is to make your content clear and concise. The Make Things Accessible: Plain English tip sheet is a useful resource for guidance on how to make your writing more accessible.
2. Choose a clear font and size
Sans serif fonts (Arial, Calibri, Verdana) are easier to read than serif fonts, and the font size should be clear and big enough for the format you are using.
If you want to emphasize text use bold rather than underlining or italics. This is because underlining is often used for hyperlinks and italics are more difficult to read.
3. Tell your audience where links are taking them
You need to contextualise your links to help those using screen readers where possible. Avoid using the URL itself, however, if you can’t, tell your audience where the link is going. For example: BBC News homepage www.bbc.co.uk/news.
4. Check the colour contrast between the text and background
Use a colour contrast checker to make sure the contrast is high enough at 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text:
Avoid green/red, blue/purple and light green/yellow as these colour combinations are problematic for people with colour vision deficiencies. Do not use colour alone to convey meaning, and always include a secondary characteristic as an indicator.
5. Write clear and meaningful alternative text for images
If your content includes images, you need to include some text explaining what they are showing, this is called ‘alt text’ (or alternative text). The important thing to remember is to provide the context that you want the image to convey. The Make Things Accessible guides on creating meaningful alt text, alt text for complex images, and race, gender and physical descriptions in alt text are all useful.
6. Include captions and transcripts when sharing videos
Including video and other media in your content can make it much more accessible, but it can present challenges for some users. Provide captions and transcripts, audio descriptions, and descriptions of video images to improve accessibility for users.