Digital accessibility is an important segment of content creation that doesn’t always get the recognition it deserves. When creating posts and content for your salon, you want to cast a wide net, making your beautiful work consumable by the largest audience possible. While we focus on inclusion and equality, we often forget to invite the disabled community to the party.
Understanding and acknowledging that this omission is never done maliciously, we can all probably admit that we can do more as beauty businesses to make our content accessible to all. Our accessible salon spaces, our inclusive services, our training on adaptability – it call be communicated more effectively with a few small tweaks.
Those who use accessibility aids to use their devices would love to know what it is you’re trying to convey. So make it easier with these easy tips: How to make your salon social media more accessible
Add Alt Text to your Posts
Anywhere you share an image, you have the option to add alt text to describe them. From Instagram to your own website, alt text allows those who rely on screen readers to read their content to them. Adding it is incredibly easy, and you can easy google “add alt text to images on [name of website builder]” to learn step by step how to do it.
On Instagram, follow this short tutorial:
Adding alt text is the right thing to do to ensure your entire audience, including the visually impaired, can admire your work. As an added bonus, adding alt text to your social posts helps the platforms’ algorithms know what you’re posting and who to serve your content to, resulting in better optimized SEO.
Add Captions to Your Videos
Video content is huge in digital marketing, and will only grow in importance. Not only does video as is exclude the deaf and hard of hearing communities, it is widely known that most social media video is consumed without sound. Adding captions to your videos is a must; it’s no longer just nice to have.
The good news is that it is incredibly easy to add captions to your videos whether created in Instagram, TikTok, or on your phone. As major social media platforms come to the realization that social media is for everyone, they’ve added caption options with virtually a single click. How to make your salon social media more accessible
Follow these options below to add captions in Instagram Stories:
and the Instagram Reels process is very similar:
And TikTok:
If you want to create captions for your other videos that aren’t necessarily for TikTok or Reels, you can use an app called Clipomatic to create captions as you speak. It is an Apple only app, but if you rock with Android, an alternative is called AutoCap. How to make your salon social media more accessible
Avoid Special Character Text
Beauty is an aesthetically focused industry, but the special characters used in our social media bios and captions aren’t accessible to screen readers. In order to ensure everyone can be a part of the conversation, use only the text generated by your regular mobile keyboard.
If you’re not sure what I mean by special characters, it is any time you see letters and symbols ⓛⅰⓀΕ ΤħⒺⓢε (like these.) They may look cool for about 3 seconds, but then you realize they’re just hard to read.
What do you think? Are you ready to incorporate these practices into your social content creation? You’ll be surprised how many people you will help with these simple tweaks. How to make your salon social media more accessible