Making your content more accessible is one of the easiest ways to increase your audience.
While Instagram has offered new tools to offer different ways to engage with content, there’s still a lot of easy steps we can choose to make our content even better!
For the past few days, I’ve been reaching out to my audience through my stories to learn about their needs. The Polls sticker is a great way to collect feedback.
You can view the process by tapping the ‘Accessibility’ stories highlight on my Instagram profile.
People have also shared with me many resources and tips that I’ll pass on to you:
- Add descriptions of images in our captions. For example a photo of me right now I could describe as, “Stephen is sitting in front of his computer, his hair is long and unwashed. He seems stressed but happy that he is at home.
- We can also describe or transcribe our posts by filling in the Alt Text found under ‘Advanced Settings’ when making or editing a post.
- We can caption or transcript our videos. Using static, not animated text is easiest to read. Use a contrasting background for the text so it stands out from the video.
- There are free fonts like this one, Atkinson Hyperlegible, that are designed for easy reading.
- Small, swoopy, and animated text might be fun, but it can be hard to read.
- #NotCapitalizingOurHashtags makes text to speech tools read out each letter individually.
- For font colours, we want to make sure that we have good contrast between the text colour and the background colour.
WebAim.org/resources/contrastchecker is a tool that will allow you to measure and adjust your text and background contrast. - When sharing Grid Posts to our Stories, it is not always clear that the square is tappable. A simple “Tap Below to Read” is all you need to add!
- For those that can share links in their stories, the Swipe Up action will be hidden if the story has a light background. A simple ‘Swipe Up to Read’ in a contrasting colour can help.
- Remember blogs? I know this type of image with text post is popular now on Instagram, but web text allows readers to adjust font size, change fonts, use browser reading modes, and it is easier for screen readers.
I leave a link in the caption to a blog version of my posts. This one can be found at KindofStephen.com/InstagramAccessibility - For big blocks of text, left-aligned text is easier to read.
- Try to break down chunks of text into smaller sections of three.
- Big blocks of italicized text can be hard to read, they’re best used for emphasis. Consider bolding too!
For other tips on accessibility tap through to @Access_Guide_, right on Instagram!
