Social Media Accessibility for Charleston Brands

Accessibility is the part of social media strategy almost nobody in our market talks about, and it is one of the few changes that improves reach and does the right thing at the same time. Roughly one in four American adults lives with some form of disability. If your content is unusable for them, you are not just losing goodwill — you are losing customers who live fifteen minutes from your door.

Captions Are Not Optional Anymore

Most video on social is watched with the sound off. That is true for everyone, not only for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Captions are the single highest-return accessibility change you can make, and they measurably increase watch time.

Auto-captions are a starting point, not a finish line. They routinely mangle local names — Legare, Huger, Vanderhorst, Beaufain — and a caption that says the wrong thing is worse than none. Review and correct them, especially for street and neighborhood names that matter to a Charleston audience.

Burn captions into the video when you can, or use the platform's native caption feature. Both work. What does not work is assuming the viewer will turn the sound on.

Write Alt Text Like a Human

Alt text describes an image for someone using a screen reader. Instagram generates it automatically and the results are close to useless — a generic guess at what is in the frame.

Writing your own takes fifteen seconds. Describe what matters: the subject, the setting, any text in the image. "Exterior of our Upper King Street storefront at dusk with string lights above the patio" is far more useful than "may be an image of a building."

A side benefit: alt text is indexable content. It gives platforms and search engines actual words to work with on a post that is otherwise just pixels.

Contrast and Text Size

Thin white type over a bright sky is everywhere in Charleston content, and it is nearly unreadable for a lot of people. If you cannot read the text on your phone at arm's length in daylight, it is too small or too low contrast.

Add a scrim or a shadow behind text placed over photography. Increase weight rather than size when space is tight. Avoid pure color-on-color combinations like red on green, which disappear for people with common forms of color blindness.

Small Habits That Add Up

Put hashtags at the end of a caption, not scattered through it. Screen readers read every one aloud, and a caption interrupted by hashtags becomes incoherent.

Write hashtags in camel case — CharlestonSmallBusiness rather than charlestonsmallbusiness. Screen readers parse the capitalized version into words. Sighted readers find it easier too.

Use emoji sparingly and never as a substitute for words. Each one is read aloud by its full description, so a caption built from emoji becomes a long string of nonsense.

Avoid rapid strobing or flashing effects in video. Beyond being unpleasant, they can trigger seizures.

Why This Helps Your Numbers

Every item above makes content easier to consume for everyone. Captions help the person scrolling in a quiet waiting room. Higher contrast helps someone outside in Charleston sun. Cleaner hashtags help the algorithm categorize your post.

Accessibility improvements are usually just quality improvements with a better reason behind them.

Where to Start

Pick captions. Do that consistently for a month before adding anything else. Then add alt text on every static post. Then audit contrast across your templates.

Trying to fix everything at once means fixing nothing. One habit at a time sticks.

Ready to elevate your Charleston business on social media? Palm Social is here to help — visit thepalm.social to get started.