Communities and Justice

Accessibility tips

 

Many smartphones and tablets come with screen readers built in.

How to turn on Apple iPhone’s screenreader or go to Settings  Apple Voice over icon > General > Accessibility > VoiceOver.

How to turn on Android’s screen reader or Press both volume keys for 3 seconds.

Some applications such as Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat come with screen-readers. Software such as ZoomText and JAWS can be installed on desktop and notebook computers to read text across all applications, documents and websites.

Facebook

Facebook has a number of accessibility features.

Facebook has automatic alt text which can scan a posted photo, and using object recognition technology, read out a description of the photo. Simply turn on your screen reader to use this feature. Learn more about Facebook’s automatic alt text.

Facebook supports the uploading of captions for videos.

Find out more about Facebook’s Accessibility features and learn how to turn on captions for videos, navigate News Feed using a screen reader, how to like, comment and share News Feed posts etc.

Keyboard shortcuts for Facebook.

Twitter

Twitter supports alternative text descriptions for images.

Keyboard shortcuts for Twitter

YouTube

YouTube supports closed captions. Even if the content producer has not uploaded captions YouTube will automatically create them. In the bottom right corner of a YouTube video is a CC icon..

Closed captions icon. Select this to turn on captions.

Find out more about Accessibility for the YouTube mobile app

Keyboard shortcuts for YouTube

A YouTube video screen with the closed captions button in the bottom right.

Navigating websites

On websites and browsers that support accessibility use the Tab key, and Shift-Tab to skip between headings and hyperlinks. Enter will open a hyperlink. Alt-left arrow can be used to go to the previously web page.

Last updated:

21 Jul 2024