Most of what excludes people from a community is not built into the platform. It is created fresh every day, by the people posting. An undescribed screenshot, a video with no captions, a poll answered in emoji — each one quietly removes somebody, and none of them appear in any settings screen.
Which is good news, because it means most of the fix is habits rather than budget.
What actually shuts people out
Four barriers account for most of it, and all four are cheap to remove once someone points them out.
| Barrier | Who it affects | The fix |
|---|---|---|
| Screenshots with no description | Blind and low-vision members, and anyone on a slow connection | One sentence saying what it shows |
| Video and live calls with no captions or transcript | Deaf and hard-of-hearing members, non-native speakers, anyone in a noisy room | Auto-captions, plus a written summary |
| Walls of unbroken text | Dyslexic members, people reading on phones, everyone tired | Short paragraphs and real headings |
| Meaning carried only by colour or emoji | Colour-blind members and screen reader users | Say it in words as well |
None of these require a budget, a consultant, or a platform migration. They require someone deciding that this is how the community writes, and then modelling it until it spreads — which makes it a culture question, not a technical one.
Alt text is a caption, not a label
The most common mistake is describing the file rather than the point.
"Screenshot of dashboard" tells a blind member nothing. "Dashboard showing signups flat for three months, then doubling in March" tells them exactly what the sighted members are looking at. Write what you would say if you were describing it to someone on the phone, which is both easier than the rules make it sound and more useful than most alt text that follows them.
For a chart, give the finding rather than the axes. For a meme, describe the joke — an image described as "funny cat picture" is a punchline nobody got.
Captions, transcripts, and the underrated recording
Live sessions are where communities lose the most people, and it is rarely deliberate.
Automatic captions are imperfect and still worth switching on, because imperfect captions are enormously better than none. A written summary afterwards costs ten minutes and serves deaf members, non-native speakers, people who were at work, and anyone searching for the answer six months later.
The recording is an accessibility feature, not a convenience. Treating attendance as the only way to participate excludes people with unpredictable health, caring responsibilities, or a different time zone — see how to run community events for the scheduling side of this.
Write so it can be scanned
The formatting that helps disabled members is the formatting that helps everybody, which is why this one spreads easily.
Headings that describe what follows — the same discipline that makes a well-structured community navigable — paragraphs of a few lines, lists where a list is meant, and links whose text says where they go — "the pricing page" rather than "click here", because a screen reader user navigating by links hears only the link text.
Plain language belongs here too. Shorter sentences and fewer idioms help dyslexic readers, people with cognitive fatigue, and the large group of members reading in a second language — the same argument as running a multilingual community, arriving from a different direction.
Do not let emoji become the interface
Emoji are fine as decoration and a problem as infrastructure.
A screen reader reads them aloud, one by one, with their official names. A heading padded with six sparkles is six announcements before the actual words. A poll where the options are only emoji reactions is unanswerable without sighted guessing, and a status system built on coloured circles is invisible to a colour-blind member.
Use them alongside words, never instead of them. This costs nothing and is the single easiest habit to establish early, because it feels like a style preference rather than a rule.
Norms do more than settings
You can write accessibility into how the community behaves, and that outlasts any configuration.
Put it in the code of conduct as a positive expectation rather than a prohibition: describe your images, caption your clips, say it in words as well as colour. Then make it normal by doing it yourself in every post, including the ones nobody will scrutinise — norms in a community are learned from what regulars do, not from what the rules say.
Two norms are worth stating explicitly. Lurking is legitimate participation, because pressure to post excludes people managing energy carefully. And nobody should be required to appear on camera, which is a barrier for more people than it appears — some of the reasoning is in onboarding new members.
Ask, and do not appoint a spokesperson
You will not guess every barrier, and the members who hit them usually will not report them unprompted.
Ask directly and periodically: is anything here hard to use, and what would help. Then fix something visibly, because the second time you ask, people answer based on what happened the first time.
Do not turn one disabled member into your accessibility department. Being asked to audit a community you joined for other reasons is unpaid work, and it also produces a narrow answer — one person's needs are not the category's.
Where the platform is the limit
Some of this genuinely is not yours to fix, and being honest about that is better than vague reassurance.
Keyboard navigation, focus order, contrast, whether the editor works with a screen reader — those belong to whoever built the software. Ask your platform for specifics rather than a compliance claim: which flows have been tested with a screen reader, when, and what is known to be broken. A vendor who can answer that is worth more than one with a badge.
Meanwhile, do not let platform limits stall the ninety percent that is yours. A community with careful alt text and captioned calls on imperfect software is more usable than a silent one on perfect software.
The bottom line
Describe your images, caption your video, write in short paragraphs, and never let colour or emoji carry meaning alone.
Say those things out loud as expectations, do them yourself first, ask members what is still hard, and press your platform on the parts you cannot reach. Accessibility work has the unusual property that almost everything you do for a few people improves the place for everyone — the captions get used by commuters, the alt text by people on slow connections, and the plain language by everybody reading in a second language, which in most communities is a lot of people. It is also the same care that judging posts fairly requires, since the members most often misjudged are frequently the same ones.