Social media and digital accessibility: what your posts are missing

Categorie:

Every day, thousands of organisations post updates, images and videos on social media. And every day, some of their audience simply cannot access them.

Not because the platforms are unusable. Not because of a lack of will. But because nobody has taught these teams what a misplaced emoji, a hashtag in lower case, or an image without a description does to a person who is blind, visually impaired or dyslexic.

Social media isn’t automatically accessible just because it’s popular. In many ways, it’s actually a particularly challenging environment for people with disabilities. And it’s you, as a content creator, who can make a difference.

In this article, I explain why accessibility on social media is a real issue, who it affects, and what the four most common types of problems are that you need to be aware of above all else.

Why social media accessibility is a real issue

Platforms equipped with accessibility tools, but the content remains your responsibility

Since June 2025, the European Accessibility Act (EAA) has come into force across the European Union, including Luxembourg. Communication services are now required to comply with accessibility requirements. And indeed, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, X and YouTube all offer dedicated features: adding alternative text to images, subtitles for videos, language options and display settings. These tools exist. This is an important fact to be aware of.

But here’s what these tools won’t do for you: they won’t write relevant alternative text for your images, they won’t correct errors in your automatic captions, they won’t choose your emojis or organise your hashtags. As a content creator, what you have complete control over is what you publish.

Platform accessibility tools are only useful if you use them – and if you use them properly. The alternative text automatically generated by the artificial intelligence on Facebook, Instagram or Threads often contains errors. A group photo might be described as “perhaps an image of two smiling people” – with no context whatsoever regarding the event, the date or the people present. This level of description is no substitute for text alternatives written by a human who understands the context of the post.

Who is affected?

One immediately thinks of blind people. But the scope is much broader.

People with visual impairments use screen magnification software or screen readers. People who are deaf or hard of hearing cannot access video content without subtitles. People with dyslexia struggle to decipher hashtags written in lower-case letters or text formatted with special characters. People with cognitive difficulties are thrown off by emojis used indiscriminately, or by incoherent text structures.

In Luxembourg, between 15% and 20% of the population is directly affected by some form of disability. In addition to this are older people, those for whom French is not their first language, and anyone who would simply benefit from clearer, better-structured content.

The four most common accessibility issues on social media

1. Images without alternative text

This is the most common and well-known problem. And yet, it remains widespread. An image published without alternative text is invisible to people who use a screen reader.

On social media, almost every image conveys information. An event poster, a conference photo, a campaign visual: all of this content conveys information that isn’t always included in the post’s text. Without alternative text, this information is simply lost on part of your audience.

The good news is that LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, X and Mastodon all allow you to add alternative text manually when you post. This feature exists. It’s just rarely used.

2. Emojis used indiscriminately

Emojis are read aloud by screen readers. Each emoji is pronounced according to its official description, as defined by the Unicode Consortium.

What may seem harmless visually can turn into an auditory nightmare. A message that begins with three ‘police siren’ emojis will be spoken out as ‘police siren, police siren, police siren’ before the actual content of the message is even reached. A row of decorative emojis at the end of a post has the same effect.

The rule is simple: one emoji per idea, at the end of the sentence, with a verifiable meaning.

3. Hashtags in lower case

A hashtag like #accessibilitenumerique is difficult for a screen reader to read. Many programmes will read out the sequence of letters without being able to distinguish the words that make it up.

The solution can be summed up in a single line: use camelCase or PascalCase notation, i.e. capitalise the first letter of each word. #AccessibiliteNumerique is easier for everyone to read – and more compatible with certain screen readers.

4. Fake bold, fake italics and fake columns

Online tools allow you to ‘format’ text on social media: bold text, fancy italics, and artificial columns created using spaces. These visual effects may look appealing, but they are actually disastrous for accessibility.

These formatting techniques do not use actual typographic characters but Unicode mathematical symbols. Screen readers either ignore them or read them out as symbols – turning a carefully crafted message into a string of incomprehensible sounds. In 2025, no social media platform offers a native solution for formatting text in an accessible way. These practices must therefore be abandoned.

What platforms do and what they don’t do

It would be unfair not to acknowledge the efforts made by the platforms. Some have made real progress.

LinkedIn has offered, for several years, the option to add alternative text to images and import subtitle files for videos. Its automatic subtitles do work, but only in English for native automatic generation: they need to be checked before publication.

Instagram allows you to add alternative text to photos when posting, via the ‘Accessibility’ section in the advanced settings. For Reels, you can also add alternative text in the advanced settings before posting. Automatic captions are available for videos and Stories via the “Caption Stickers” feature in the mobile app. But their quality requires systematic checking.

Facebook automatically generates alternative text for images using image recognition. This automatically generated text is often inaccurate and should be replaced with a manually written description.

X (formerly Twitter) allows you to add alternative text to images and even lets you set a reminder so you don’t forget to do so before posting.

Mastodon and Bluesky both allow users to specify the language of an entire post – a feature not yet offered by any other platform, which enables screen readers to read the content aloud in the correct language.

What platforms still do not allow, in 2025: marking an image as purely decorative (so that it is ignored by screen readers), applying genuine accessible typographical formatting (bold, italics) in posts, or providing a text transcript directly linked to a video.

The key point to bear in mind: even when accessibility features are available, they are only useful if you actually use them. Poorly written automatic alternative text is less useful than no text at all if it is misleading.

Accessibility on social media is something you can learn

What these few examples illustrate is not a list of additional constraints. It is a different – and better – way of producing content.

Writing good alternative text requires learning how to describe an image using the right words. Using emojis in an accessible way requires understanding how assistive technologies process them. Writing hashtags in camelCase is a habit that can be picked up in a matter of days.

None of these practices are intuitive at first. With the right training, however, they can all become second nature.

The following articles in this series cover each of these topics in detail: images, videos and audio content, and editorial mistakes to avoid at all costs. And if you’d like to develop these skills in a structured way, training courses are available for you and your team.

Trainings available on request:

FAQ – Social media and digital accessibility

Are my social media posts subject to legal accessibility requirements in Luxembourg?

If your organisation is a public body, a local authority, a government department or a non-profit organisation funded predominantly by public funds, the answer is yes. The Act of 28 May 2019 covers all your digital communications, including social media. For private companies subject to the Act of 8 March 2023, the answer depends on your sector of activity. If in doubt, it is recommended that you review your communications.

Don’t the platforms take care of accessibility themselves?

Partially. Major platforms have incorporated accessibility features: alternative text, automatic captions, and display options. However, these features remain inadequate and, for the most part, remain inactive unless you use them. The quality of your content’s accessibility depends above all on your editorial practices.

Does it take a long time to implement these best practices?

It takes less time than you might think, once you’ve got the hang of it. Writing alternative text for an image takes less than a minute once you know what to write. Correcting a hashtag in camelCase takes just a second. The main challenge is to train the people who produce the content, so that these checks become automatic.

Should we manage all platforms at the same time?

No. It’s more effective to start with the platforms you use most, applying the practices that have the greatest impact: alt text for images, captions for videos, and camelCase for hashtags. These three measures already cover a large part of what’s required.

How can I check that my posts are accessible?

For images, read through your alt text and ask yourself whether someone who cannot see the image would understand exactly the same thing as someone who can. For emojis, read your text whilst mentally vocalising each emoji according to its Unicode description. For hashtags, search your text for any keywords without internal capital letters. And to take it a step further, there are practical training courses that allow you to test your own posts using a real screen reader.

References

Contactez-moi