4 Digital Accessibility Essentials
Social media and other online spaces can be inclusive, welcoming places for everyone when accessibility is at the forefront of our minds. However, many disabled people are left out of everything online from important conversations to entertainment because their access needs are not considered. Here are four simple ways to ensure your content is inclusive in the digital world.
- Include alt-text and image descriptions.
Adding alt-text or IDs to all images ensures blind, visually impaired, low vision, and other disabled people can engage with visual content online. Each digital platform has a different process to add alt text or IDs, but including descriptions on all visual media will make your content more equitable by allowing more disabled people to consume and engage with it.
- Add captions.
Because many disabled people rely on captions, adding captions to all content with audio adds another vital layer of accessibility to your virtual spaces. Even live content can and should be captioned using Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART).
- Avoid decorative fonts.
Cursive, handwritten, or custom fonts can be difficult to read and impossible for screen readers to decipher. Using standard fonts without embellishments increases accessibility and is more likely to be supported on all devices and platforms.
- Limit emoji use.
Emojis can give insight to tone and emotion in written text, when used sparingly. Overusing emojis can make text difficult to comprehend, especially for disabled people that rely on screen readers.
Creating and sharing accessible content benefits everyone. Accessibility is easier to implement when it is at the forefront of the planning process, rather than an afterthought. While implementing these four necessities into your digital content will increase accessibility, this is not a comprehensive list to ensure perfect accessibility within your content.
For an in-depth, hands-on guidance on digital accessibility, book a discovery call or purchase the recording of our “Digital Accessibility” Live Training Event, led by LaVant Consulting’s in-house social media accessibility expert Sofia Webster.
