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.

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.

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…

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.