How To Make Your Content Accessible To Everyone

I'm going a little left field for the topic of my LinkedIn Newsletter this week. Being visually impaired myself, I've a great interested in creating content that's accessible for people with disabilities. So, I thought I'd share some tips to help you make content more accessible – and boost your overall content creation skills.

I know there are many different accessibility tweaks you can do to cater for people with a range of conditions– dyslexia, deafness, neurodivergence. But I'll stick to what I know best – accessibility for the visually impaired.

Add Photo Descriptions To Your Posts

When you're posting a picture in your social media posts, consider adding a description of that picture. Social media platforms give you the option to do this using the Alt Text feature, or you can just write a description underneath the picture. All you need is a brief description of what the image contains. And each photo description gives you an opportunity to boost your SEO with keywords.

Plain Text Versions of Documents

If you've created how-to guides, mini-books and other resources as PDFs, consider creating an alternative version in plain text, in a Word document. Blind people use screenreaders that read out content to them, and it's much easier for them to do this if there are no pictures. And for partially sighted souls like me, the text in Word documents is much clearer than in PDFs.

Create Specific Calls To Action

You may be pleased with the calls to action on your website saying Buy Now and Click Here. But a screenreader doesn't know where Here is, and it can't tell the blind user which site they're buying from now. Create more specific calls to action: Buy on Amazon, Browse My Services. This makes your messages clearer for everyone.

That's the great thing about accessibility. It doesn't just benefit the people who need accessibility features. It benefits every potential customer who interacts with you, and it benefits you in terms of SEO, stronger calls to action, and the ability to tap into a market of customers with disabilities.