Formula 1 — more commonly known as F1 — racing is a massively popular motorsport with an international fanbase that grows every year. According to a recent Forbes article, F1 now reaches roughly 750 million people on a yearly basis, nearly 10 percent of the global population. With so many dedicated followers around the world, it stands to reason that there are people with disabilities within the F1 fanbase.
Unfortunately, like with many major sports teams and leagues, accessibility appears to be an afterthought for the digital teams of F1. Alt text and video captions are frequently missing from media, and pleas from fans for accessible content are mostly ignored.
To better understand digital accessibility in F1 and how it impacts the sport’s fanbase, I interviewed Dr. Georgia Carroll. Dr. Carroll is an F1 fan in Australia who recently started pushing F1 teams to make their social media content accessible.
Hi! I’m Dr. Georgia Carroll! I have a PhD in Sociology from the University of Sydney where I studied fandom communities. By day, I’ve worked across the communications spectrum including as a publicist in the publishing industry, a social media strategist at a marketing agency, and now in strategic communications for a federal government department here in Australia. And by night, I research and consult on fan engagement.
My passion for accessibility comes largely from the fact my big brother has Down Syndrome, so I’ve grown up heavily involved in disability advocacy in my personal life. People with intellectual disabilities such as Down Syndrome face a lot of issues with accessing content and information as fans, which is a shame as my brother and his friends are some of the biggest fans I’ve ever met! Witnessing that made me think about accessibility issues in fan engagement on a broader scale, and here we are.
I became an F1 fan because of Drive to Survive! It was New Year’s Eve 2021 and my best friend was visiting me during a heatwave here in Australia. It was too hot to do anything but hang out in her hotel, and she suggested we turn it on.
I literally knew nothing about motorsport, but I love reality television and am a sports fan more broadly so I figured I’d give it a shot. It was love at first sight, and by the middle of January 2022 we had tickets to the Australian Grand Prix, and I’ve never looked back.
I’ve stayed engaged for a few reasons: I love the personalities, I love the drama, and a lot of my friends and colleagues are also fans, so it’s fun to be able to have that kind of connection and conversation starter. I’m not a very technical person so a lot of the engineering goes over my head, but it’s also so cool to see how like, the tiniest tweak of a front wing can make such a huge difference.
As an Aussie, it’s also great to have Oscar Piastri as such as a superstar on the grid, and I’m excited to see what Jack Doohan gets up to in 2025!
F1 has undergone a huge shift over the past five years because of Drive to Survive and its resulting increase in popularity. The “traditional” F1 fan is — much like a lot of sports fans — older and male.
However, since 2020 there has been a huge upswing in female fans and we’ve also seen a big shift towards modes of participation more traditionally associated with female fandom within the sport. This includes things like fan video edits, fanfiction, and the increase in being fans of the drivers as a celebrity rather than an athlete or part of a team. This can also be tied back to the lockdown portions of the pandemic where online community became a much more significant part of all of our lives due to our real-life isolation. We needed to find spaces to belong, and online fandoms are a prime example of somewhere to connect!
F1 is also a much more deliberately global sport than something like the NHL or NBA, which do have fans in other countries but primarily exist in a North American context.
What this all means for the sport is that it becomes necessary for more effort to be put into digital content as it’s the primary way fans are connecting with you. It’s not like it’s a sport where you have a regular physical “home” base that can function as the hub of your fan community — you’re on a new continent most weeks and the majority of fans aren’t going to get to go to a race in real life.
It boils down to this: People with disabilities are fans, and when teams and organisations don’t share accessible content, they’re ultimately telling them they’re not welcome. I always say, I don’t care what trend you’re jumping on, or what meme you’re sharing to rack up engagement — if it’s not accessible you’re not actually doing your job because you’re cutting fans out of the conversation.
Being a fan is all about passion and finding a sense of belonging and connection, and everyone deserves to experience that. You can’t say you’re trying to grow the sport if you have an asterisk next to who’s welcome.
You can think of it like this: if you were at a physical gathering and were walking around showing everyone a cool picture but then going up to some groups and saying, “sorry, I have a really cool picture here but you’re not allowed to look,” that would be considered super rude behaviour. People would rightfully be like, “Um, what are you doing?!” And yet it’s exactly what teams are doing when they don’t make their content accessible, and everyone is totally fine with it.
So Alexa (and Accessible Social!) actually first opened my eyes to the importance of digital accessibility around 2020, but it wasn’t until I started my F1 fan engagement project at the start of 2024 that I began really paying attention to how much of an impact inaccessibility could have on the ways fans experience their favourite things.
I was tracking, for example, the ways F1 teams share their results across a weekend and quickly realised that almost every team was putting all of their information into a graphic without alt text. It made me go, “Huh. So, you just don’t care if fans who use screen readers don’t know how your drivers are doing?” And then as I started paying more attention, I realised I couldn’t just sit back and do nothing.
When I talk about fan engagement, I’m not just thinking about how a fan who goes to a grand prix enjoys their day. I’m looking at how fans who want to know more about the sport, a team, or a driver can receive content, be welcomed into communities, and made to feel valued as a fan. They’re the fundamentals, and yet they’re what fans with disabilities are missing out on because of inaccessible content.
I’ve encountered so much resistance, especially when I directly call out posts on Twitter and Threads (vs when I do my research posts and share them on LinkedIn). For some reason, people view me replying, “Hey, please don’t forget to add alt text to make this information accessible,” as spam, whereas if I posted, “OMG I love [driver],” under every post, it would be considered appropriate (and encouraged) engagement.
I’ve been blocked on LinkedIn by the digital manager of one of the teams for pointing out that even though a video they shared was very cool, it was an inaccessible way to share results. I’ve also had tweets and Threads posts reported so many times that my account has been both actually banned, and shadowbanned (although to be clear: I have no idea who is doing the reporting!).
I’ve also had people warn me that I’m getting a bad reputation for myself among some of the teams because I consistently point out their inaccessibility. But I don’t care if I’m getting a bad reputation, because I’m trying to encourage an inclusive community where every fan feels welcome, and that’s not something to be ashamed of (and honestly, I wouldn’t want to work with a team where that’s considered a bad thing!).
I would love the chance to sit down with some of the digital teams and ask them questions about how they approach accessibility. I would love to know how often a lack of alt text is due to restrictions in scheduling platforms vs. deliberate decisions, for example, or whether something like a lack of accessibility training is a hurdle for them. If there are solutions we can help with, or plans in the pipeline, it would be great to know.
I am not disabled, and so the lack of accessible content doesn’t impact how I am personally able to consume and engage. However, because I am so aware of it, it does sour my experience because now I can’t unsee it and I get frustrated that it’s so consistent.
There’s one popular driver marketing account that started using alt text after seeing my replies one weekend and liked the reply I left thanking them for using it. And then they’ve never used it again. And that’s frustrating because you have acknowledged that it’s something you should be doing, shown it’s something you can do, and now I’m just left feeling as though you clearly don’t actually care about inclusion or accessibility.
This is a tough one to answer because certain teams will have staff like my posts on LinkedIn when I give an accessibility audit and share information about the importance of accessibility and some of them have even added me as a connection off the back of those kinds of posts but then…nothing. And that’s why I think it would be useful to understand how much is out of the control of the individual social media manager and whether they’re working behind the scenes to try and implement a more accessible strategy.
The main problem is teams will occasionally use alt text, but it’s never consistent, and never on a permanent basis. So, some race weeks I’ll be excited to see some progress and think they’re taking the learnings on board because they use alt text multiple times, but then the next race week not only is no alt text used, they’re also uploading videos without captions and using third party fonts.
To give you an idea of the landscape: there were 24 races in 2024, and no team managed to include alt text on their results graphic at any point.
I will say, however, that the fan engagement team for 2025 rookie Ollie Bearman (TeamOB on social media) have been super responsive to me pointing out that they hadn’t been adding alt text to their posts and have started using it more often than not. I even got a DM from them this week thanking me for sharing the Accessible Social resources to help educate them and saying that they want people to keep calling them out if they do forget to add alt text moving forward.
I’m not expecting perfection, because none of us are perfect, but it’s been so refreshing to receive this feedback and see someone actually making an effort! They’ve also said they’ve mentioned to Ollie that he should be adding alt text to his content, and if we see that happen that would be huge as no drivers are currently sharing accessible content through their personal channels.
I would love it if we could all be more vocal about calling out inaccessible content when we see it. People have asked me why I call out inaccessibility when I’m not personally affected, and it would be so great if we could get to a place where speaking out on these issues isn’t just more work expected of people with disabilities. I know that images should have alt text and videos should have captions. Just because I don’t personally need that alt text doesn’t mean that it’s not my place to say “hey, why isn’t this accessible?”. If we all do it, it becomes harder to ignore.
The thing is, even if you’re someone who doesn’t see the point in advocating because it doesn’t impact the majority (feedback I have been given!), any one of us could become disabled tomorrow through illness or injury. Just because you don’t need a screen reader or captions or whatever else today doesn’t mean it’s not in your future. And yes, that might not be something you want to think about but it’s our reality.
Encouraging accessibility is a net win for all of us.
I would love to see three things, and it’s frustrating because they’re three things that are so, so simple!
I’m aware that often there are accessibility hurdles when third party scheduling tools are used, but a lot of what is posted during race weekends is happening as live updates and requires quick design and pivoting. That means there is a lot of room for alt text to be added into workflows. Thirty extra seconds of work means that fans who need alt text can actually know how a team is going, and that makes all of the difference.
On a bigger scale, the teams really need to overhaul their websites to make them accessible. I did an analysis of the websites based on how my brother — as a fan with low literacy — would be able to navigate them and almost every single team has prioritised “cool design” over accessibility for any kind of disability. Navigation is complicated, there are flashing images, autoplaying videos, no alt text, and information written in complicated language. An entire website overhaul is a much bigger issue, but it’s not like online accessibility guidelines and regulations are new!
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To learn more about Dr. Carroll and support her advocacy work, follow her on social media. She can be found on LinkedIn, Threads, BlueSky, and Twitter/X.
