Accessible content for Facebook Pt.1

Hi dear readers! I hope you are starting wonderful this new year. Before getting into it I wanted to tell you that we’re working in Sunu to renew ourselves and bring you our very best. It’s true that I missed writing and finding you here. Thank you so much for being with me in another entry. This is Ely García, with love.

Do you remember in 2021 we talked about web accessibility and everything it implies? I told you which social network where the most accessible and even I showed you how to create accessible content for Twitter.

We talked about how social networks can be 100% accessible in their own platform, but it’s on the users to keep up the accessibility of their own media. Well, continuing this series today we’ll find out how to make Facebook content that is accessible to everyone. We’ll divide this blog into two sections since the options they give us are plenty.

The Facebook Help Center offers a lot of information about accessibility to their users, including instructions step by step to utilize the shortcut keys using a keyboard, screen readers, subtitles for videos and much more.

Today we will learn how to add an ‘Alternative text’ or ‘alt text’ to an image on Facebook. And you will be surprised of how simple it is, if we can just follow this next steps:

1. We open the photo and click on “Edit”

2. We’ll select the “Change Alt Text” option, adding our own alternative text that describes the photo and then click on “save”.

And we are set! With this little change any user with a screen reader will be able to get to know your content.

It’s also useful to know that even if you don’t add the alternative text to an image, Facebook does it for you. In 2016 the company introduced an algorithm that recognizes objects and concepts in photos and then automatically generates tags that make the images more accessible to users with low vision. Of course, if you want to make sure that your images are correctly identified, adding descriptions by your hand is still the recommended method, but it’s cool that a platform of social media as important as it is today adopts a proactive approach to solve the accessibility of their own media.

This is it for todays blog, I hope you enjoy it but don’t worry! I’ll be back again very soon to tell you more about this beautiful world of web accessibility.
For more information on this topic you can go here:
https://www.facebook.com/help/273947702950567

We’ll be reading each other soon.

With love,
Ely García.