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…
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.
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.
Because links are such critical elements of our emails, we should think about all the different parts of them that need accessibility support.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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!
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 alternative text expectations users have for them.
