Weekend: How to Add Alt Text to Images on Every Social Media Platform

[Overview]
Learn how to add alt text to social media images to make your posts accessible and inclusive. Allison Sheridan demonstrates practical tips for Slack, Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Discord, and more from her recent ScreenCastsONLINE demonstration.

In this accessible tech tutorial, Allison Sheridan walks through the essential steps of adding alt text (alternative text) to images across popular social media platforms. You’ll hear how screen reader users experience posts with and without alt text, highlighting why it’s so important to include meaningful descriptions.

Alison explores platforms like Slack, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Mastodon, and Discord, showing exactly where to find the alt text settings and how to craft descriptions that capture the feeling and context of a photo. She also demonstrates how AI tools such as Be My Eyes can help generate rich alt text automatically and shares a bonus tip on using Mona for Mastodon to streamline the process.

Whether you want to make your content more inclusive or simply expand your reach, this tutorial gives you the tools to write clear, effective, and engaging alt text for any platform.

This content was brought to us courtesy of ScreenCastsONLINE, a video tutorial subscription service all about using Mac and iOS apps. This tutorial was such an important public service, that the owner of ScreenCastsONLINE, Lee Garrett chose to make it publicly available. You can also get a 7-day free trial of ScreenCastsONLINE by going to https://screencastsonline.com and signing up, and then you’ll be able to watch all of the back catalog during those 7 days.