Blogging tips: Ways to make your posts more accessible and inclusive.

Sassy-who blogs over at Thinking Out Loud-is blind and is passionate about raising awareness of how to make blogging and social media as accessible as possible. It’s something we may forget to consider at times, but making your blog, youtube and social posts accessible to those with visual impairments and other needs; takes only a few minutes and is so important. Here she shares some invaluable advice we should all implement…

We are in an era where everything is showcased online: the good, the bad and the ugly. The Internet is a place where some of us share our stories in the hopes of educating, entertaining or connecting with one another to form friendships. This is especially true for those who live with a disability because it can be very lonely and isolating.
So before you hit publish here are some ways you can be more inclusive online for an audience you may not realise you have.

How to make your blog more inclusive and accesible

First up, use alt text when adding photos to your blog. If you use WordPress, blogger, Squarespace or something else adding photos to your blog post makes them more inviting and readable for your audience. If blogging is your hobby or bringing you an income please make sure you use the alt tag/alternative attributes feature correctly.

To put it simply, you are just describing the photo and its scene. Think of it like the who, what, where, why, when situation.
If you were to close your eyes and ask someone to describe a photo to you that you have never seen you would want as much information as possible that also relates to the subject matter; for example,  a blog post about baking – you would most likely include pictures of the cake/cookies you have baked. Are they large or small? Decorated or plane? What flavours are they?

Blind people, like myself,  use screen reading technology to allowers to navigate the Internet and unfortunately for us when we land on a photo- instead of artificial technology explaining what the photo is –  it will only give us the file name instead.
Describing what your images are of is not only inclusive but helps with SEO too: keyword stuffing or copying and pasting the title is the incorrect way to use alt text or alternative attributes.

Making your YouTube channel more inclusive+accesible

The main way to be more inclusive on YouTube is by adding closed captions. Closed captions are written transcripts of what is going on in the video and any dialogue you may have. It is an effective way to allow anyone with a disability or non-native speaker to follow and comprehend what you are saying or doing. in your video.
It’s great for SEO too:  Search engines can’t crawl video, but they can crawl text. If you want your videos to rank on Google, back your video up with captions and a transcript of the audio.

Making your social media posts more accesible and inclusive

It’s mostly about adding photo description to any images you share online. But I thought I would explain it in a clearer fashion…

Adding captions on Facebook

Facebook has recently rolled out its version of adding photo descriptions, known as captions. The one drawback to this is; if you upload only one photo, you can’t add a photo caption, through the method I am going to explain below. You would need to do this manually by writing it as part of the status or putting it in the first comment.
◦ So you make a status in the normal way and then click ‘photo’, select all the photos you want to upload, then click on the first photo.
◦ It’ll bring up all of the photos in a column, and under each photo there will be a box which says ‘add caption’.
◦ You can click into that and type an individual comment or description for each photo which will appear under that photo only, not in the status itself.

Adding image descriptions to Twitter

Go to: Settings> Accessibility > Compose Image Descriptions
Swipe to turn on, Once this function is enabled, anyone who adds a picture on Twitter then has the option of adding a description.

This can be a maximum of 420 characters. Again, this will be embedded within the photo so people using screen readers can appreciate your photo too.

Adding captions to Instagram

Realising that Facebook and Twitter have had a positive response from the disabled community by implementing artificial intelligence and photo description elements; Instagram have now added features for you to add your own alt text/photo description.

Create your photo as usual and then click on advanced settings, there will already be writing in place as this is the artificial intelligence working to give those with screen readers an idea of what is in the photo. I highly suggest that you delete this and add your own caption, this way it will be more detailed and of course accurate.

Whether it is a hashtag or a handle, so many people don’t understand that having words all lowercase without spaces is read aloud very quickly when, you are blind and use a screen reader. By adding capitalisation to each new word it is effectively like adding a space between each word.

Memes and gifs

Artificial intelligence still hasn’t caught up yet: pictures without photo description, videos without sound and text as a screenshot cannot be accessed or read aloud by screen readers.
You can help to make social media more accessible by explaining what the meme or gif is, referring back to alt text/photo description that I mentioned at the beginning of this post.

I hope you find this post useful and if you’d like to learn more about how specifically to make your blog more accessible please check out this post . For a detailed explanation of how to add closed captions to YouTube videos please check out this YouTube playlist by Jessica, A deaf and chronically ill YouTuber.  

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