Media Accessibility

The practice of ensuring that media content — including images, videos, audio, GIFs, memes, and other multimedia formats — is perceivable and understandable by people with diverse abilities. Media accessibility encompasses providing alternative text for images, captions and transcripts for audio and video, audio descriptions for visual content in videos, and ensuring that interactive media elements are operable with assistive technologies. On social media platforms, media accessibility is particularly challenging because the majority of content is user-generated, meaning platforms must both provide accessible authoring tools and motivate users to create accessible content. The rapid evolution of media formats (stories, reels, stickers, embedded previews) continually creates new accessibility gaps.