The Valentin Haüy Association is an organisation dedicated to helping the blind and visually impaired to live an autonomous life with access to digital technology. Together with creative agency, We Are Social France, they utilised Twitter’s text function and enlisted the help of famous comedians to post funny memes on the platform, with additional text underneath.

Most social networks offer audio description of online content using a screen reader. But visual humour including most memes cannot be translated and are therefore inaccessible to the blind or visually impaired.

For memes specifically, the audio readings often consist of a series of disjointed words in a literal tone with confusing explanations of emojis. However, Twitter enables anyone to add text underneath published images.

Comedians including Guillermo Guiz, Urbain, Verino, Lilia Benchabane, Mamouz and Pierre Thevenoux posted humorous content which was then picked up by the audio description tool. The posts were shared throughout the day on 3 December 2021 on the Valentin Haüy Association twitter account.

This creative and short-term campaign highlighted the opportunity for brands to utilise digital tools to promote accessibility in their social campaigns. Find the full Twitter campaign here.