Editor's note: Liking, commenting, and messaging on social media with a mobile screen reader break down in three places, and each one is worth checking on your own site.
- Likes and shares: action icons cannot be isolated from the post, like gestures can confirm without working, and share recipients can appear as unlabeled profile pictures.
- Comments: replies often are not distinguished from comments, sort menus may not announce the current choice, and the comment toolbar cannot always be reached.
- Direct messages: message replies can read one line at a time, and an attachment a company sent could not be found, which stopped a warranty claim.
Michael Taylor, a UsableNet contributor, is blind and relies on a screen reader to use the web. He shares his first-hand experiences to help others understand what it is like to navigate the web with a disability. This is the final post in a three-part series on social media accessibility.
Some of the most impactful social media activities involve interacting with a post's content and other users. This can include liking or sharing a post, commenting on a post, or communicating with another member or business. In the rest of this blog, I'll cover the most common accessibility challenges I run into with these tasks. As with reading posts, mobile screen reader accessibility will be the primary focus here.
Taking Action On A Post
Users may want to take action on a post, such as liking it or reposting it as a follower share. Here are some of the challenges I run into with this process. Oftentimes, social media interfaces include the post's action buttons as small icons at the bottom of the post's content. Since my screen reader generally reads the post as a single element, it is often difficult or impossible to isolate these options to activate.
Some social media platforms include verbal prompts that tell me that performing certain swipe or tap gestures while focused on a post will allow me to interact with the embedded action buttons. However, these sometimes fail to work correctly. For example, I may perform the suggested gesture to like the post and receive auditory feedback that the action has been taken, but nothing visually changes.
On another note, when I try to share a post with a friend or other connected member, the share sheet often displays the available recipients' profile pictures instead of their profile names. If these icons lack proper labels for screen reader recognition, they will not be announced correctly, which keeps me from sharing the post.
Commenting On A Post
Commenting on a social media post also has its share of potential accessibility issues. For one, when navigating the list of existing comments and replies, there is often no auditory indication of which messages are original comments and which entries are replies. This makes it incredibly difficult for me to follow the flow of the conversation.
When I try to sort a list of comments for easier organization or searching, the sort menu options sometimes have no auditory indication of which choices are selected, both by default and after I change them. This makes it impossible to know the current sort order to make a meaningful adjustment.
When typing a comment, a row of options often appears above the virtual keyboard, allowing actions such as adding a link to the comment or including an attachment. In some cases, my screen reader simply cannot locate or focus on this bar of action buttons. Other times, I can reach them only by direct touch, but they will not be found when navigating manually by swipe.
Direct Messages
Another way to interact on social media is via direct message. I have found that the most powerful use for this feature is contacting companies and businesses directly through social media for customer support or other requests. The messaging systems on these social media platforms are usually proprietary and can have some very strange issues.
One issue I have been experiencing with increasing frequency is that I can only hear the contents of message replies one line at a time. If I use manual swipe navigation, only one line is focused per swipe. If I use direct touch, tapping a specific spot on the screen only reads the line in the message directly below the tap point instead of the entire message. This is not an effective way to hear messages and correspond efficiently.
In other cases, the screen reader will completely ignore any attachments included with a message. For example, I recently contacted a company on social media regarding a product warranty claim. They replied with a file I needed to fill out and send back so they could process the claim.
However, my screen reader could not locate or isolate the attachment in the company's message. That meant I could not download and save it for editing, and therefore could not complete the warranty claim.
Where That Leaves Me
Social media interactions are unfortunately an area of particular accessibility frustration for me. I hope that my commentary here will help provide guidance and awareness to fuel accessibility improvements in this area.
Common questions about social media interactions and screen readers
Why can a screen reader not reach the like or share button on a post?
When a feed reads each post as one single element, the small action icons at the bottom of the post cannot be isolated and activated. Gesture shortcuts can help, but in the experience described here, a like gesture sometimes confirmed the action out loud without anything changing on screen.
What happens when share recipients appear only as profile pictures?
If the profile pictures in a share sheet have no labels, a screen reader cannot announce who each recipient is, so the post cannot be shared. The same unlabeled icon problem came up earlier in this series when composing a post.
How do screen readers handle threaded comments and replies?
Without a spoken cue marking which entries are comments and which are replies, a threaded conversation sounds like one flat list. That makes the conversation very hard to follow by ear.
Can screen reader users open attachments in social media direct messages?
Not always. In the warranty claim described here, the screen reader couldn't locate the file a company sent, so it couldn't be downloaded, filled out, or returned, and the claim couldn't be completed.
What to check on your own site
The interactions in this post are not unique to social networks. Review votes, Q&A threads, sort menus on product listings, and customer support chat all use the same patterns. If a customer can only hear your support replies one line at a time, or cannot find the form you sent them, that support conversation ends there. An automated accessibility testing tool can help flag unlabeled buttons and images across your pages, while problems like a gesture that reports success without doing anything, or an attachment a screen reader cannot find, are worth testing by hand.
Barriers like these, especially in customer support flows, can lead to accessibility complaints. Clear buttons and links are one focus of our upcoming webinar with OuterBox, Web Accessibility, SEO and AI Search: Building Clearer Website Content, on November 18 at 12 pm ET. Register to get practical tips from Jeff Adams of UsableNet and Colin Gacek of OuterBox on helping visitors know where to go and what to do.
