Global Accessibility Awareness Day

Global Accessibility Awareness Day got us thinking, what are the biggest stumbling blocks when accessing websites and social media with a vision impairment? Harriet and Ruqaiya from the VICTA Young Ambassador Strive team have highlighted the biggest issues they face which everyone can keep in mind when creating content.

There are a couple of simple changes you can make today. The first, remember to keep your hashtags capitalised #AccessibleHashtagsPlease, as this helps screen readers to read them correctly, and secondly remember to keep adding image descriptions to your social media posts!

Watch Ibraheem’s video guide below which explains how to make your Instagram posts as accessible as possible.

Ruqaiya

Personally, I find websites inaccessible when they don’t have adequate image descriptions, when they are not screen reader friendly and when they do not have high contrast to make writing prominent. Also the layout of the website has to be simple, making it easy to navigate.

Harriet

In terms of accessing content online, sometimes I do find it annoying that people don’t always put image descriptions on social media, but it personally doesn’t bother me that much and it wouldn’t be one of my main accessibility issues. If websites have a lot of pictures on, I can find that quite hard to navigate. Also, when navigating apps on my iPhone, it can be very confusing if a certain part of the app isn’t labelled, because when this happens voiceover says “Unlabelled button.” This can make the app very difficult to navigate, and I would therefore avoid using it.