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.

And I have to say, there were so many amazing sessions. I’m super excited (and relieved) to know that I will be able to watch the ones I missed as soon as those videos drop! And I wanted to extend that to you readers as well, get those videos!

However, as this is a blog focused on email accessibility I thought it would be great to focus on the accessibility/disability related sessions and some of my key takeaways.

First up was the fountain-of-knowledge that is Paul Airy and his session titled, “Accessibility Implementation: Removing the Resistance with Behavioral Science”. As always, his session was thoroughly researched and full of great nuggets of wisdom to help you break down the mental road blocks that keep any of us (or our stakeholders and bosses!) from taking the steps towards creating more accessible emails. What I really enjoyed about this session is that it wasn’t a typical spewing of statistics that we’ve all heard over and over again, nor was it another repeated checklist of things we can do to make our emails accessible. Instead, Paul digs deeper and really puts the onus on you the person and forces you to take an inward look at yourself and really challenge yourself towards change. *Plus*, he takes it a step further by giving you the tools to start challenging your colleagues in a brain-change-focused way. In conversations over the amazing litmus live meals, I found myself often referring back to some of the biases he discussed. I have so much respect for Paul and was grateful for the bits of time between sessions where we were able to talk shop and look forward to more such discussions.

Someone new to me was Tyler Loposser whose session titled, “Designing for Inclusion: Positioning Accessibility Practices Into Your Already-Busy Workflow” was a really intriguing point of view that I don’t think we hear often in the email space – that of a designer. I was excited to see how he approached accessibility self-education and the direction he went by informing his team and even the higher levels of his company. As someone who also tends to bang the accessibility drum in corporate settings, I really appreciated his approach of gentle guidance and setting himself up as a thought leader within his organization. He even took us on a bit of a tour of his Sharepoint microsite/resource and some of the documentation he uses to support his team. I *really* liked his approach to internal channel social media-esque posts to further distribute information *and* continually realign his team to the central focus of making marketing communications for all users. Sorry to my Oracle team, but you might see some similar happenings in our accessibility slack channel. (I’m not at all sorry) I was grateful to have some additional time to talk to Tyler afterwards and it was really cathartic to talk shop about some of the specifics of advocating for email recipients with disabilities in a professional setting and some of the odd tangents you end up going on when talking to stakeholders. (I even ended up pulling in some of the convo from Paul’s session, it was super relevant!) I hope to hear more from Tyler as his accessibility program grows and I can’t wait to see where he goes with it!

Another speaker who was new to me was Davida Fernandez. Her session, “Supporting Your ADHD Colleagues” was an absolute beacon of neurodiversity inclusion and support. As a parent of a young adult with ADHD, I have spent many a restless night worried about what their future holds. I found myself holding my breath through the early myth busting portion of her presentation while realizing that these were the very words I was lacking when fighting teacher after teacher who struggled to support my non-conforming sunbeam. I also did a bit of internal calculus to determine how likely it could be for me to persuade Davida to start speaking directly to my ADHDer’s future employers. The session was also a bit of a personal sucker punch, I have spent so much time and energy making sure that the emails I create are accessible to all and haven’t spent nearly enough time considering the other people I’m creating emails *with*. How can I better communicate to the people I work with? How can I bring a higher level of empathy to those that may internally struggle because the way I approach a concept may seem incongruous to someone with a different neurotype than myself? Could some of the friction points in my production process be reduced by including more multi-modal supporting documents? I will likely continue to think about this as I head back to work in the next few days and start re-examining my current documentation and supporting resources. I also have to add  that as someone who spent a lot of my energy getting my kids to a place where they could confidently self-advocate, it was such an absolute thrill to see Davida take the stage and talk openly about her diagnoses, especially knowing how challenging it must have been to get there, understanding too well the sizable work-place stigmas that affect those with ADHD and Autism. (I also absolutely cherished the crowd of email marketers that were happily celebrating neurodiversity right along with me!)

That leads me to the final talk of the night, Mark Robbins and Naomi West’s session, “99.9% of Emails Fail Basic Accessibility Testing, Why?” I’m sure I’m not the only person that poured over the EMC’s Accessibility report when it came out earlier this year. Having Mark and Naomi as guides into some of the finer details and critical questions the report forces you to ask felt a bit like a few friends showing me around a new city and making sure to point out all their favorite spots and local folklore. They hit on some really critical points that I feel confident we will continue to see crop up in future conversations about accessibility – largely what our responsibility is and isn’t. And like Davida’s session, I had a bit of whiplash as Mark and Naomi again took us outside of the production lines of creating emails into a broader world of reporting email client accessibility failures, and working with ESP’s to expand their support of accessible solutions that are currently needlessly removed from our code when deployed. As someone who reviews lots of emails for accessibility best practices, the numbers provided did not surprise me at all, I’m still absolutely shocked and delighted when a proper accessible email enters my inbox. It is rare, but rare is better than where we were just a handful of years ago. I was extremely happy to meet both Mark and Naomi in real life and to steal a few conversations with them both over the course of the last few days. I’m extremely excited about the future of the Parcel accessibility checker and the strides the entire Parcel team is making in pushing accessibility into the center stage and making it even easier for email marketers to take some of those precarious early steps into emails that support all users.

I realized as I was going through the litmus live schedule again that I actually missed a session that had an accessibility focus! “Unleash Email Awesomeness: Ways to Delight Your Subscribers Through Teamwork!” By Gulben Karaoglu. This is definitely one I’ll have to watch via video and add to my post here once I have.

There were lots of other great sessions that I want to call out quickly too. I deeply appreciated Emaily Ryan’s session about email footers and her passion for underlining links. Though I don’t recall her calling it out as an accessibility requirement, it absolutely is and she made sure to hit home how important it was with every lovely example she showed us. Samar Owais walked us through a case study and threw out some amazing nuggets on how she worked with users to solve problems and build trust. Najmah Salam really made an impact with her talk about establishing your brand and communicating who you are and the value you bring to your team/clients. I really enjoyed the panel on AI, the whole group had great insights, with Chad White cutting to the point on what value AI actually brings vs. the hype we’ve been hearing about. Even though I have never migrated an ESP in my life, I felt somewhat more likely to achieve success with Kisha Anderson’s in-depth guidance. Anne Tomlin’s progress bar was exactly the kind of in-depth coding deep dive that is a balm to my weary coding soul. I would be absolutely remiss to not include Alice Li’s focus on sustainability (though I wasn’t super keen on the “sustainability is the new accessibility” statement, isn’t there room for both??) which really had me rethinking some of my processes and forgotten code remnants of yesteryear. 

Of course, the true magic of Litmus Live (for me at least) is in-between sessions, over lunch, on the elevator, and heck, even on the shuttle ride back to the airport. It’s all the people that you get to meet that you may not have connected with otherwise. I love hearing what other email marketers are up to and what they’re excited about! Finding common ground, and bonding over things that stress us out, is part of the real fun of Litmus Live. This time I even got to meet two co-workers in real life! I’m grateful to have been able to reconnect with old friends, and create new connections with new friends, and to continue to explore the ever-expanding world of email marketing together.

There’s so much more than that, but the lull of the plane engines are making writing a little harder, so for now, know that the 10th anniversary of Litmus Live was everything I was hoping for and more. (And I haven’t even been able to dig into Litmus’ new announcements as well!!) Litmus Live continues to change the focus of discussion around email marketing and I can’t wait to take my learnings here to my broader team and continue to push forward.

Goodnight!