Why image-based emails are bad

TLDR; Just don’t.

Okay look. This has already been explained very well here, here and here. BUT I’m writing this blog post in order to add my voice to resounding cacophony of folks that say don’t do this because this is an issue that needs to be corrected.

In my experience, the only people that think image-based emails are good are people that are still making image based emails.

And I get it – from a production speed and creative control standpoint, there really isn’t a better way to make emails than image-based. It’s generally faster to build and you can’t beat the pixel perfect rendering available when the entire email is literally pixels, well if you’re careful and/or build full width images.

From the tests I’ve seen – most users don’t seem to care either – with A/B tests usually netting out a “meh” response to image based vs live text. Most email recipients aren’t paying attention to the nuance between image-based emails and live text emails. (But the folks that notice, NOTICE!)

BUT there are some serious drawbacks to image-based emails and before I get into the big issue of accessibility I want to do a quick rundown on why live text emails really are the best option:

1. Personalization: We’ve all seen the metrics that show us how much better personalized emails perform. With live text, you can easily populate all kinds of content specific to the recipient that you just can’t really do without proprietary software like Movable Ink (Also, NOT not accessible unless you’re doing some deep alt text work)
   
2. Loading time: Nobody has time for that! Seriously, you want us to wait for your images to load? Especially if you have text in those images so you’re creating retina images so your text is nice and crisp! These images are too big and they will take longer to load.
   
3. Fast changes: Your product price has reduced? With image-based emails someone has to wake up a designer and get them to make a new image slice to update the cost. (Don’t forget to update that alt text!) With live text, that price can be changed by the person that deploys your messages – super simple, fast and easy within your ESP.
   
4. Dark Mode support: Stop freaking out about your colors inverting and do the work to make sure your dark mode solution looks good – and that includes live text!
   
5. Images off: If a recipient has images turned off or is in a low service area, they won’t see any of the content of your email.
   

The above points by themselves are enough reason to move away from image-based builds without the topic of accessibility which has a constitutional amendment backing up its necessity!

Why not just use alt text?

When accessibility and image-based emails get brought up, I often hear the response of “if you use alt text – it’s accessible”.

As someone who likes to talk a lot about alt text, obviously I think alt text is important but I need to emphasize this point, alt text is NOT a cure-all.

Let’s put this into some simple maths for us:

Only 2.4% of the US population is blind (https://nfb.org/resources/blindness-statistics)

Even if every blind person in the US used a screen reader, surprise they don’t!  Then the very highest number you’d get would be 2.4% of the population. Obviously if  you send emails exclusively to blind/low vision users your metrics would be different.

We are not building accessible emails for only the 2.4% of the US population that is blind. The 2.4% is not capturing the full picture of disability in the US. 27% of American adults in the US have some kind of disability.

To do the math here – 100% of disabled users cannot possibly be screen reader users.

That means roughly 24% of folks in the US with a disability do not use screen readers.

Yes, alt text is important but it’s not EVERYTHING and when we’re specifically talking about image-based emails we are causing some real problems for specific users:

• People with low vision that can see your email but need to zoom in do not get your alt text. What happens when you zoom into images of text? Ugliness, that’s what. That text gets blurry, bitmapped and harder to read when you use a zoom tool to read email. Not to mention the horizontal scrolling required to read it since the text can’t reflow.
  
• People with color blindness might choose to use a plugin assistive technology that inverts colors similar to dark mode. If that text is stuck in an image that’s going to impact whether or not it can be read clearly.
  
• People with dyslexia might use a text to speech plugin assistive technology that reads the content of the text on a document, but may not read the alt text of an image since the user can see it. If there is text on that image – the AT may not read it.

So no – alt text is definitely not all you need. Your text needs to be text – not images!! Users with disabilities need more than just alt text.

This is an absolutely critical component of email accessibility. You should have as little text in your images as possible (saving some very specific scenarios like logos, handwriting, font examples, etc). While it improves your emails in other ways – the accessibility component is a major factor that should move us all away from image-based emails once and for all.