Accessibility Best Practices for Social Media

To truly be inclusive, social media practitioners must follow accessibility best practices to ensure that all content is available for as many people as possible. 

While we cannot control what accessibility features are on each social media platform, we can leverage the existing features to optimize our content, by following these best practices.

General Best Practices

  • Include alt text on photos whenever possible.
    • If text is embedded on an image/graphic, be sure to include that text verbatim in the alt text.
    • Not sure how to craft alt text? Axess labs has a helpful guide.
  • Include closed captions on videos whenever possible.
    >Captioning Resources
  • Use CamelCase on hashtags that contain multiple words.
  • Avoid acronyms and initialisms in posts whenever possible, unless the acronym is widely recognizable (e.g. NASA).
  • Make sure color contrast is accessible.
  • Use a URL shortener to minimize characters.
  • Avoid using special fonts and typefaces.
  • Use emojis strategically and keep screen readers in mind.
    • Avoid using special characters to create images.

Accessibility Checklist by Channel

Facebook logo.

Facebook

Instagram logo.

Instagram

X/Twitter logo.

X/Twitter

  • Did you include alt text, if posting a photo?
  • If posting a video, have captions/SRT files been included?
  • Did you place @ mentions and reach hashtags at the end of the post (if they aren’t being used as part of the post copy)?
LinkedIn logo.

LinkedIn

TikTok logo.

TikTok

  • If your video includes spoken audio, have you turned on and edited auto captions?
YouTube logo.