Making Your Posts Accessible: Habits That Widen Your Reach
Around one in four people in the UK has a disability, and many are scrolling past posts that accidentally shut them out. Seven small habits — from useful alt text to capitalised hashtags — make the same posts readable by far more of the people you made them for.
Dave Smith
# Making Your Posts Accessible: Habits That Widen Your Reach
Around one in four people in the UK has a disability. That's not a niche audience — that's a quarter of the people who might want to buy from you. And a good chunk of them are scrolling past your posts right now, not because they're not interested, but because your content is accidentally shutting them out.
Here's the bit that makes this worth five minutes of your time: accessible posts aren't just kinder. They perform better for everyone. Captions help commuters watching on mute. Plain language helps people skimming in a queue. Decent contrast helps anyone reading a phone in the sun. Accessibility isn't a side quest — it's just good posting with a wider net.
The best part? None of this requires a budget, a consultant, or a redesign. It's a handful of small habits. Here are seven worth building.
1. Write alt text (and make it useful)
Alt text is the short description a screen reader speaks aloud when it reaches an image. Facebook, Instagram and X all let you add it — it's usually tucked under "advanced settings" or "accessibility" when you create a post.
The habit isn't just adding it. It's making it say something. "Photo of cake" tells a blind or partially sighted follower almost nothing. "Three-tier wedding cake with pressed wildflowers and a deep green ribbon" lets them actually picture what you made — which is the entire point of posting the photo.
A useful test: if someone read your alt text down the phone to you, would you understand why the image was worth sharing? If not, add the detail that makes it so.
2. Capitalise each word in your hashtags
#smallbusinesssupport is a wall of letters. #SmallBusinessSupport is three words. Screen readers can pronounce the second one properly; the first often comes out as garbled soup.
This one costs you literally nothing. It also makes hashtags easier for everyone to read at a glance — you've probably squinted at a lowercase hashtag yourself trying to work out where one word ends and the next begins. (There's a reason #susanalbumparty is the cautionary tale it is.)
3. Don't trap important information inside the image
If your opening times, offer details or event date exist only as text baked into a graphic, a screen reader can't read them, and neither can anyone whose connection is too slow to load the image properly.
The habit: whatever matters in the image, repeat it in the caption. Posting a poster for Saturday's open day? The date, time and address go in the caption too. It takes ten seconds and doubles as better content for search — text in captions is findable, text in images mostly isn't.
4. Caption your videos
Roughly 18 million people in the UK are deaf or have hearing loss — and beyond that, most people scroll with the sound off anyway. A video without captions is a silent film without the title cards. Viewers don't turn the sound on to find out what you're saying; they scroll past.
Most platforms now auto-generate captions, and they're decent — but check them before posting. Auto-captions have a special talent for mangling business names, local place names, and industry terms. Thirty seconds of proofreading saves you from your own name appearing as something unfortunate.
5. Go easy on the emojis
Screen readers announce every emoji by name. Three flame emojis after your sentence reads as "fire, fire, fire". A string of ten assorted emojis is a ten-item list read aloud in full, every time, before your follower gets to the next line.
You don't need to give them up. Just use them like seasoning rather than the whole meal: a couple at the end of a post, not sprinkled between every word. And never use an emoji as the only way of conveying meaning — "Open Saturday ✅" reads fine, but a bare "✅" as your whole answer doesn't.
6. Skip the fancy fonts
Those 𝓼𝔀𝓲𝓻𝓵𝔂 letters and 𝕓𝕠𝕝𝕕 characters you can paste into captions and bios aren't actually fonts — they're mathematical symbols standing in for letters. Screen readers either skip them entirely or read out each symbol's technical name. Either way, your carefully styled sentence becomes silence or gibberish.
They're also harder for everyone to read, dyslexic followers especially. If you want emphasis, structure your sentence so it doesn't need decoration. Plain text is the most accessible design choice there is.
7. Check your contrast
Pale grey text on white. Yellow on light green. That on-brand colour combination that looked lovely in the mockup and is unreadable on a phone in daylight. Low-contrast graphics quietly exclude partially sighted followers and mildly annoy everybody else.
You don't need design software to fix this — squint at your graphic, or step back from the screen. If the text disappears, the contrast isn't there. Dark text on light backgrounds (or the reverse) beats subtle every time.
Start with one
Seven habits at once is a resolution; one habit is a change. Start with whichever fits how you already post — captions if you're video-first, alt text if you post photos, hashtag capitals if you're a hashtag person. Each one becomes automatic within a couple of weeks, and then you add the next.
None of it is extra content. It's the same posts, readable by more of the people you made them for. If the writing part is what eats your time, that's the bit Aunty Social handles — it generates the posts so you've got the spare five minutes to make them accessible.
A quarter of your potential audience is a lot of customers to leave standing outside. The door's not hard to open.