3 Simple Ways to Be Inclusive in Online Writing and Social Media Posts
If you’re trying to reach more people, why ignore millions of readers?
Ableism is the discrimination or prejudice against people who have disabilities. Ableism can take the form of ideas and assumptions, stereotypes, attitudes and practices, physical barriers in the environment, or larger scale oppression. It is oftentimes unintentional and most people are completely unaware of the impact of their words or actions.
Numerous online writers, website owners, and social media posters are searching for a magic formula to get more readers. Yet they ignore a large portion of the population, the millions of visually impaired who use assistive technologies to read.
As with many other social issues, we often don’t pay attention unless we, or someone we know, are affected. But how can we maintain this attitude when so much of our conversations are around equity? The internet can be a way to provide more equity by bringing knowledge into homes. But it isn’t when users aren’t required to add information, and a whole group of people can only get a part of the intended message. Imagine if you didn’t include a picture at all in your posts. How many readers would you get? I would guess it would be less than a quarter of what anyone is currently getting.
The National Federation for the Blind (NFB) reports there were 7,675,600 visually impaired (VI) people in the US in 2016. The NFB defined VI as the “number of non-institutionalized, male or female, ages sixteen through seventy-five +, all races, regardless of ethnicity, with all education levels in the United States reported to have a visual disability in 2016.” They also note they “encourage people to consider themselves as blind if their sight is bad enough — even with corrective lenses — that they must use alternative methods to engage in any activity that people with normal vision would do using their eyes.”
If you live outside the US, want to reach more people outside the US, or aren’t impressed with adding “only” a possible 7.7 million more readers, maybe this next statistic will get you on board. A 2010 report from the World Health Organization (WHO) reports: “Globally the number of people of all ages visually impaired is estimated to be 285 million, of whom 39 million are blind.”
Three things you should add to your writing and social media posts to include the visually impaired:
1. Alternative (ALT) Text
Alternative text is also referred to as Alt tags, Alt attributes, or Alt descriptions. Anyone can add these text descriptions of their images on social media posts, websites, and blogs.
Many visually impaired people who use the internet use screen readers to read the text for them. Alt-text provides a description that screen readers can say to those listening. If you don’t add a description of the image, some sites add an artificial intelligence (AI) guess of what they think the image is. As with other AI, the “guesses” are often wrong. It usually takes less than a minute to write a description of the image. It also becomes a habit to add alt tags if you do so consistently.
Charts uploaded as images present another problem when trying to provide the information to the visually impaired. Sites often don’t offer enough characters for Alt-text to describe the data adequately. In those cases, there are a few things you can do. You can re-create the chart in a separate document and add the link in the photo caption. Then the reader can read all of the information by going to the linked document for the full description. If you’re using a chart from another site, be sure to include any link to a screen reader-friendly copy. Or, at the very least, write a summary of the information in the Alt-text of what the chart is.
With WordPress and Medium, it’s easy to add Alt-text. The option to enter it appears right after adding the image. In Medium, the place to add Alt-text is on the right side of the options bar above the image. Alt-text can be added in two different areas on WordPress sites. One is when uploading the image to the photo library, the other is when uploading an image directly into the post.
Other types of writing can also use Alt-text, such as PowerPoint, Microsoft Word documents, and Google Docs. Video tutorials are available to learn how to add alt text in images in Microsoft Word and Google Docs. The Microsoft website has information for making Powerpoints accessible here.
Social Media– Many of the major platforms allow people to add Alt-text to their posts as well.
Twitter– A help guide for adding image descriptions from Twitter is available here. Twitter support notes that if you leave alt text empty, they add the word “image” for screen readers. No further description. Because Twitter is a visual site, not adding Alt-text leaves your posts very uninteresting to the visually impaired.
Instagram– Here’s an Instagram blog post on accessibility through alternative text support.
Facebook– Here’s a Facebook help post on replacing AI Alt-text with a personal description.
Instagram and Facebook have similar technology because they are both under the Facebook umbrella. They use “object recognition technology” to provide a description for the image if the person posting doesn’t provide one.
One side note on Alt-text, if you Google the term “Alt-tag,” the highest-ranking results are about search engine optimization(SEO). That’s because Alt-tags sometimes provide higher rankings if you add them. But Google and other search engines often change their SEO criteria. Please don’t be tempted to start stuffing your Alt-text with keywords just to try to get higher rankings.
2. Adding headings to your writing
Adding headings to your writing is another way to make posts more accessible for screen reader users. Microsoft and Google Docs both suggest formatting writing with headers to organize documents into sections for easier reading. They help screen readers more easily navigate for those who want to skip around within the document. You can find a video for using heading styles for accessibility from Microsoft here. Google Docs has a help page that provides information on using headers within Google Docs for accessibility here.
3. Add descriptive language to your videos
YouTube and TikTok video platforms make it easy for anyone to upload videos. Many of those videos are how to’s or provide education on all sorts of topics. People that make videos should write the copy so that it also makes sense to the visually impaired. For example, describe how to do things, don’t just count on the pictures. Doing your videos without solely counting on visuals also provides you the opportunity to reach an audience with more time to listen to the material than watch. Some even turn the videos into podcasts.
For more information on ways to be more accessible, the federal government has a great resource here. The toolkit is written for state and local governments to easily meet Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requirements. But it also offers ideas essential for writers and businesses with websites.
To find out more about what you can do to help people with disabilities, you may be interested in this post-