Access all areas?
Access all areas?
Are you cutting off 28% of your audience by not using alt text? We want to change that – and help make social media a more accessible place. Lauren White, COO of Puzzle, has the scoop on our new campaign, #AccessAlt.
As Desmond Tutu once said – there is only one way to eat an elephant: a bite at a time.
Change doesn’t always come easy. Well, not the change we want to see. Plenty is thrust upon us that we don’t want. But that’s a different blog post, for a different time. Maybe even by a different person.
Anyway, back to change.
We’ve done a lot at Puzzle that I’m proud of. And a lot of that has been driven by who we are as a team, our values, how we work together and what we produce when we do. A good few years back, we had a real drive to broaden out our partners’ campaigns and social feeds, to show and to include a much wider and more representative snapshot of the world we live in. It wasn’t especially hard to do and clients didn’t take much – if any – persuading. We also put a bit of extra work in with our proprietary influencer network tool, increasing BAME representation by 20% in under a year. Now it’s all a regular and inbuilt part of our campaign and content process. All we had to do was, well, do it.
But we’re not perfect and we’re always learning. This year (which is somehow 2022?) we started using alt text on our own social content. However, we didn’t follow this through logically and do it with all of our partners too (we have since – again, without fuss or kickback). Then, in a recent meeting with one of our partners, the Valuable 500, it came up how low the usage of alt text is across digital, and social in particular.
There was a bit of an ‘ah-ha’ moment. It clicked. We realised agencies have so much power to drive change in this area – given we create and manage content for so many of the biggest brands globally. Our #AccessAlt campaign was born.
According to the WHO, 28% of the global population is visually impaired. So if you’re not using alt text, you’re potentially cutting off a huge chunk of your audience. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn now all have easy to use, inbuilt alt text functions (and they work with scheduling tools like Hootsuite and Sprout). All you have to do is use them. (N.B. for reasons I do not know, ads do not have the same functionality, and alt text has to go in post copy for them.)
It’s really very easy to make alt text part of your best practice process. It’s also an excellent step on your inclusion journey, one with tangible impact.
As I may have mentioned, we’re by no means perfect when it comes to accessibility and inclusion (ahem, this website, cough cough). We’re not preaching with #AccessAlt – we want to make our industry the best it can be. And we need you to help and to do that with us!
If you work in social, for a big brand or an agency and want to commit to doing your bit, join the campaign now, and we’ll provide resources and support to help you on the way. Together, we can make social accessible.