7. Accessible Social Media: Quick Wins

A handful of small habits make every post more accessible. They take seconds and apply across Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, and TikTok.

Capitalize each word in hashtags

Write multi-word hashtags in CamelCase — capitalize the first letter of each word. Screen readers can then read the words correctly, and they are easier for everyone to read.

Use emoji sparingly and at the end

A screen reader announces the full name of every emoji (“smiling face with sunglasses”). A few are friendly; many are exhausting.

• Put emoji at the end of a sentence, not in the middle of words.
• Don’t replace words with emoji — write the word, then add the emoji if you like.
• Avoid long strings of repeated emoji.

Avoid fancy Unicode “fonts”

Those stylish bold or script letters from font-generator apps are special symbols, not real letters. Screen readers often skip them entirely or read gibberish. Use your platform’s normal text.

Carry over the big three

• Alt text on every meaningful image (Chapter 4).
• Captions on every video (Chapter 6).
• Plain language and CamelCase hashtags in the caption (this chapter and Chapter 3).

AI captions and AI alt text: review, don’t rely

Platforms increasingly auto-generate captions and alt text with AI — Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok (which added AI alt text for photos in 2025) all do it. Treat anything the AI produces as a rough draft: it mishears names, numbers, and local terms, and it cannot judge the purpose of an image. Always read it, correct it, or replace it with your own words.

Stories, Reels, and GIFs

• Add real captions to Stories/Reels — don’t rely on text you typed on the screen alone, and keep that text high-contrast and away from the edges.
• Briefly describe a GIF’s content if it carries meaning.

Where the accessibility settings live

Before-you-post checklist

• Every image has alt text.
• Every video has reviewed captions.
• Hashtags use CamelCase.
• Emoji are minimal and at the end; no emoji-as-words.
• No fancy Unicode fonts.
• Caption is in plain language; any in-image text is repeated in the caption.