Let’s make email accessible.
Email is a crucial marketing channel with over 4 billion daily users. However, most email marketers are leaving out over 27% of potential email recipients by failing to meet their access needs. This blog hopes to be an in-depth collective of articles that help email marketers make their emails more accessible to all users. Please read more on our About page.
What’s new?
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Question: How do I test my emails?
When I’m testing, I am usually testing on two main things: keyboard-based navigation and screen readers. Some screen readers change the functions on a keyboard or the tap interface of mobile devices and there’s a lot of variation in how all of these work.
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Question: How do screen reader users navigate through email clients?
I think one of the hardest mental leaps to make in accessibility is wrapping your head around how different people interact with digital products we all use every day.
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Re: Image Based Emails – Your brand font is dead
Stop using images of text – use live text instead – people use browser extensions to adjust the text on their page and that can’t work with images of text!
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Landmarks in Email
Email clients do support landmarks and they should definitely be used (sparingly) to let users navigate emails more easily.
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Why image-based emails are bad
TLDR; Just don’t.
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Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies (CPACC)
The CPACC gives you all of the information and perspective you need to be able to have really solid conversations with different folks about disability concepts.
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Trusted Tester Certification
At the tail end of 2023, I achieved a task I’ve spent the last 6ish months slowly working towards – I passed my Trusted Tester final exam!
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An Ode to Percy Jackson
An Ode to Percy Jackson “Mommy! Guess what? Percy Jackson has ADHD, too!” …and so began an epic family fandom of all things Rick Riordan I read the first set of books with my then eight-year-old (she was a voracious reader and still is) and read them again in audiobook format when my younger daughter…
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Links Deep Dive Part 4
Today, in Part 4, I’m taking a bit of a step back and asking a broader question about why we feel the need to link everything. That’s right, I’m talking about an accessible linking strategy.
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Links Deep Dive Part 3
We’ve already talked about the functional side of links and how different users activate them. Today, we’re taking that info and expanding on it.
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Links Deep Dive Part 2
Because links are such critical elements of our emails, we should think about all the different parts of them that need accessibility support.
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Links Deep Dive Part 1
Links (technically hyperlinks) are the foundation of the internet. In its simplest form, a link is already accessible. You’d think that would mean that we wouldn’t have to think that much about them, but you’d be wrong.
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Component: CTA/Buttons
There are few things as confounding in email development as the CTA link. Historically, getting anything other than an image to render has had considerable challenges. Many email developers have spent hours and hours tweaking their code to get a CTA link to visually render…
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Question: Do screen readers impact tracking pixels?
A tracking pixel is an important part of our email marketing campaigns. When a tracking pixel is loaded, it signifies that the email has been opened. So, I think we’re trying to determine if screen reader users can be included in tracking pixel data.
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Basics: Aria-label or Alt?
An aria-label is an ARIA attribute that supports assistive technologies by helping to name elements on a page or application. Many elements in our emails need an “accessible name,” which is a way for AT to define the element to AT users.
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Basics: Paradigm Shift – Think Differently About Disability
How you perceive or think about disability is important because how you think about disability changes what you *do* about disability, directly impacting the lives of people with disabilities.
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Basics: The Disability Rights Movement
One of the things that I found critical in my early years as an advocate for my kids was learning about the Disability Rights Movement. It seems abstract I guess, but the way it came about for my family was pretty specific. This starts with a story…
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Component: ARIA
Every once in a while, people will bring up adding ARIA to their emails, and quite often, my response is, “NO!!” and I thought I’d go into a bit of detail to explain that.
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Update: Litmus Live 2023
Wow, I’m on the plane home after an eventful week at Litmus Live and I’m so excited about some of the great sessions I attended. I feel the best use of my restless mind while crammed in a tin can going 500 mph is to reflect on my time there.
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Component: Headings
Accessible headings in email seem to be a bit of a side quest for many email marketers. On its face, it seems very straightforward: Wrap the main points of the email in a heading tag…
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Component: Product Stack
Let’s solve the age-old problem called “How do I make a product stack look good AND make it accessible?”
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Alternative Text Deep Dive – Part 4
It is extremely rare for an email to reach my inbox without a linked image, and that is why I saved this super heavy talk for last. Nearly every email has a functional image, that means every email marketer needs to familiarize themselves with this concept!
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Alternative Text Deep Dive – Part 3
The most critical question we need to ask ourselves when writing alt text is – what does this image do? There are different types of images and those different types of images have different alternative text needs. In this next section we’re going to go into detail about what those image types are and what…
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Alternative Text Deep Dive – Part 2
All right, in the first part of our Alt Text Deep Dive, we talked about the importance of having an alt attribute at all and how different email recipients use alt text. Today, we’re talking about some overarching best practices…
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Alternative Text Deep Dive – Part 1
Alt text really seems like it should be pretty straightforward, and in a million ways, I didn’t think this deep dive was really necessary until I turned my images off in my promotions tab in Gmail. Holy wow, things are BAD.
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Component: Legal Text
Legal text is probably the least thought about component in all of emaildom. Let’s break it down!
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Accessibility Updates You Can Make Without Anyone Noticing
Making our emails accessible really should be the whole team’s responsibility, from strategy to deployment. (Shift Left, amirite?) But in the real world – sometimes it’s not particularly easy to get stakeholders on board to new ideas. While you work on getting everyone aligned, let’s discuss a few quick things you can easily implement into…
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Friendly Reminder: Write Good Alt Text
I’m not one to campaign shame, but this really made me chuckle today. What could have they done differently to make this product grid more accessible?
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Component: Animated Gifs
Animated gifs are the darling of email marketing. There is quite literally no other way to add motion to an email that will display in nearly every single email client. Don’t believe me? Check out this caniemail.com overview on gifs. Unless you’re using an old/obsolete version of Outlook on a PC – you’re getting animated…
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Alert: VML Code Creates Accessibility Errors
Background images are frequently used in email marketing campaigns. They allow for more creative flexibility than “just” images and text. By combining the two you can provide a better visual experience for users. In addition, there’s a specific kind of call-to-action link referred to as a “bulletproof button” which allows for nearly perfect rendering across…