7 Ways to Ensure Your Instagram Account Is Compliant for Accessibility Standards
If you’re using Instagram as one of your marketing tools, it’s important that you learn ways to make your Instagram account accessible so that anyone viewing your content can have a good user experience.
In this article, I’ll go over accessibility tips for Instagram, and I’ll also throw in extra factors that will allow you to provide the best user experience possible for your followers on Instagram.
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My main goal as a Business Designer is to help your ideal audience go from initial click to long-lasting love, so by streamlining the overall User Experience and accessibility with your Instagram profile and its components, we can make sure your Ideal Client Avatar (ICA) has a frustration-free experience.
Below are tips for your Instagram account and content so you can kick-ass with marketing, accessibility, copywriting, and provide an overall amazing experience:
Accessibility for Instagram via alt text or image descriptions
Accessible hashtag use and formatting
How long your captions should be
How to format your captions
How many emojis to use—or not to use
Stories versus posts
Ok, But What Is Accessibility and What Does It Have to Do With Instagram?
Sorry if I’m throwing a lot of industry-jargon at you. Lemme rewind a bit.
Quick information download: “accessibility” refers to the practice that online entrepreneurs need to be familiar with, because by providing an “accessible” experience, you’re making sure your content can be consumed by anyone, including people who have disabilities. It’s the right thing to do, and pretty soon it will be the law.
To think about accessibility for Instagram, here’s an example: someone who is blind or has low vision will not be able to see your pictures, but will be able to read your captions with the help of a screen reader that will speak the words out loud.
If you are familiar with accessibility on Instagram (go you, you rock!), you might’ve read articles that have to do with adding alt text and image descriptions to your captions so screen readers can describe the images to low-vision users.
I’ll go through all of that in detail below, as well as provide more tips for accessibility that go beyond alt text.
Instagram Accessibility Via Alt Text and Image Descriptions
When you create visual content for those IG squares, keep in mind that people who have low vision or that can’t see… CAN’T SEE that experience.
It’s crucial to provide “alt text” or alternative text that will describe the image.
This includes writing out any text that occurs on the image, too.
When posting a new image to Instagram, look to the very bottom where it says “Advanced Settings” and tap there. At the bottom of the next screen, you’ll see “Write Alt Text” under “Accessibility.” As Instagram describes there:
“Alt text describes your photos for people with visual impairments. Alt text will be automatically created for your photos or you can choose to write your own.”
With an image like the one below, you might want to include this alt text: “Woman holding iPhone taking pictures of pastries at a bakery.”
With a more complex image like the one below, you will want to describe the background AND include the text overlay included in the post: “Woman holding iPhone sitting down on stairs outside. Text overlay says, ‘Provide an accessible experience.’”
You can also include your alt text in your image caption below your regular Instagram caption. Do this by inserting a line break, and then write “Image description:” and paste your alt text there, too. Doing this makes sure that someone with a visual impairment will be able to have the image described to them.
Accessible Instagram Hashtags
How’s your Instagram hashtag game? We all know that the right hashtags can introduce your content to swaths of new audiences, which is so exciting.
But did you know that accessible hashtags are a thing?
Consider this: someone using a screen reader will have a list of hashtags to read through. Your hashtag cloud will be read as one long string of text. You can test this by setting up a screen reader on your computer. (On a Mac, go to System Preferences and then go to Accessibility. Set up Spoken Content to be read aloud, and then test your hashtag cloud in a text document.)
You will see that most hashtags will be read properly, but some may get garbled.
To help with this, write your hashtags in CamelCase so that they’re easier to read by the screen reader and by anyone skimming your hashtags.
So, #businessdesigner can be #BusinessDesigner, and you can see how much easier it is to read.
Also, consider putting only a few core hashtags in your Instagram caption and then putting the rest in the first comment so that someone using a screen reader won’t have to listen to your entire hashtag strategy while trying to consume content in your Instagram caption.
How Long Do You Make Your Captions For Accessibility
When you sit down and read your Instagram captions out loud, how does it feel?
Do you write captions that are so long they feel like a mini podcast? (I am TOTALLY guilty of that… and I apologize!)
Do your captions barely graze the surface of what you mean to say?
Do your Instagram captions take your audience through a mini journey and drive home your core message that you intended to convey?
By thinking about all of these things, and by practicing reading your Instagrams captions aloud, you will start to realize the perfect length for your IG captions so they’re accessible and make sense.
How to Format Your Instagram Captions for Accessibility
When writing anywhere (and apologies for the mini rant, but I truly can’t help it because of my copywriting and design and User Experience background)… make it easy to read!
Here are some tips:
Break up long blocks of text into paragraphs where it makes sense. Keep paragraphs short and sweet.
Don’t use extraneous punctuation. All of these punctuation marks will be read out loud. So if you use thirteen exclamation points, a screen reader will literally read this as “exclamation point exclamation point exclamation point exclamation point exclamation point exclamation point exclamation point exclamation point exclamation point exclamation point exclamation point exclamation point exclamation point”
Along the same vein, don’t use characters or periods between your IG caption paragraphs. You don’t need them to create a line break anymore!
Use emojis sparingly. These will also be read out loud by a screen reader.
Don’t use all caps. These will be read out loud letter by letter. (OUT LOUD = “oh you tee ell oh you dee”)
How to Make Instagram Stories Accessible
Bummer alert—you can’t make Instagram stories accessible at the time of writing this post.
It doesn’t mean you should stop using IG stories entirely. It just means that you should make sure to post your main content into your actual Instagram feed so that anyone can digest your core content.
Remember—by providing a frustration-free and accessible user experience for your Instagram followers, you will enable them to digest your content with ease, navigate your optimized IG bio link to bring them from initial click to long-lasting love, and provide a professional and trustworthy brand environment that they’ll want to talk about and share with peers.
Have questions about how entrepreneurs can provide an accessible experience? Comment below!
Cover photo by Jenna Day
