Accessible Images - Social media for the visually impaired
Braille is an incredible development that blows me away every time I see someone read or write with it.
At times, I close my eyes and run my finger over a box of paracetamol, to see if I can distinguish what's going on with the Braille. It's completely perplexing!
The internet can be like that for someone who is blind, or visually impaired.
As a PR or Communications Professional, you may not be aware of the size of your visually impaired audience. It may be larger than you think - like the 'phenomenon' of the over 60's 'Silver Surfers'. But this audience is not to be overlooked.
The National Federation Of The Blind reports that a total of 2.4% of Americans have a visual disability (2015). This percentage increases to a staggering 6.4% of those over 65.
So if you have an audience that is traditionally older, you may be missing a chance to engage a large proportion of society.
But there are solutions to this, we can be better about the way we prepare our communications.
A good place to start is to consider the below three tips.
3 Top Tips
Use headings in your articles. Many visually impaired users have access to a 'Screen Reader'. This is a piece of software that dictates the type onscreen. Having titles makes it easier for the user to navigate through content and skip to later content.
Use colour with care. Colour-Blindness needn't be a problem when it comes to website navigation. With the most common form of colour-blindness being red-green, heavy use of these will make your content less accessible. Using colours to distinguish categories also assists with those with learning difficulties.
Design your forms with clear labels. A lot of internet use consists of filling in a form. Think, ordering a pizza "enter your address - line 1, line 2". If you don't clearly label each field, in a contrasting colour, the form will become difficult to access
Image Descriptions
The best advice I can give, on making your site accessible, is to make sure your images have a description.
Image descriptions don't just help those who are visually impaired, it also helps those with older browsers that often fail to load image content correctly. A description, or Alt-text, will appear instead.
Have you ever watched a movie with Audio-Description on? Think of what it would say about your website images and put that text in place.
Twitter Images
Twitter, my favourite social media platform, has a function that allows you to make your image posts more accessible.
If you head over to the 'Accessibility' settings in your Twitter account, you'll be able to switch on the option to add an image description.
When tweeting an image, you'll then be asked to enter a short description. It'll only appear for those who are using accessibility functions, so it won't 'clog up' your tweets.
A Missed Audience
Not enough people are making their websites accessible and not enough people are making their Twitter accessible. By engaging with this audience as a PR you'll be reaching people who are under-engaged.
Imagine you are a visually impaired user who rarely finds accessible content, to one day find a tweet that is not only accessible but also engaging. You're likely to interact with it, more likely so than one they can't view properly.
With up to 6% of some audiences being visually impaired, you could be one of few people speaking to that crowd.
When we live in a world of over-saturation, accessible content just makes sense.
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