About Email Accessibility
Accessibility is all about promoting meaningful interactions and relationships with all of your APSIS One Profiles, the people behind the click.
When it comes to making email messages accessible to everyone, regardless of their physical abilities or limitations, it's important to make an effort in order to promote diversity and inclusion.
In this article
Accessible Email Design
The way that you design your emails plays a big part on how the message is received. When designing emails for accessibility, here are a few things to consider:
Make sure there is a clear contrast between text and background colour or images. If the colour difference isn't clear, the text and background might merge in certain devices or in the eyes of some of your subscribers; if the text is on top of an image, it might be dismissed as it's simply too hard to read.
Write a descriptive subject line. As much as possible, try to rely on clear messages that won't get lost in translation or misunderstood by recipients who don't follow a specific reference, niched or esoteric expression.
Organise content wisely. Your readers should be able to understand the content of your email as long as there is a logical order of information. If they have to scroll through the entire email to locate the most useful content, there's a big chance that they will leave the email before reaching that point.
No images? No problem. Always include text alternatives for images in case they don't load or if your recipients read or hear your email through the text version.
Links and CTAs should be straightforward. To increase the chances of all recipients engaging with your emails, use descriptive, meaningful language for your links.
Don't skip the headers and headings. If your email contains HTML Elements, make sure that the code in the elements is accessible and can be experienced by a wide variety of recipients regardless of their abilities. Headers and tables help recipients determine which part of your email they want to read first.
Get your tables right. Table-based layouts are popular on HTML email design, since a lot of email clients will fail to render complex CSS and semantic patterns. Add the role="presentation" attribute to your tables so that accessibility tools and features don't read your table's code for the recipient. Avoid nesting, and include the attribute in all tables you add to your email.
Text Version
The text version of an email is a simplified version that contains only the text content of the email, without any pictures or any other sorts of media.
Recipients who have difficulties reading may use accessibility features to read email.
It may be difficult for certain apps, clients or browsers to display HTML content in some devices. An email with a text version will increase the popularity of the emails due to more devices being able to display it properly. By being mindful of the text version of your email, you can ensure that everyone is able to receive your communications. The text version can be read out loud by the email client to the recipient. That's a very important reason to steer away from emails that depend solely on images, as we mention in our General Tips listed in this article.
Also, it is worthy to mention that some people prefer the text version of emails due to their simplicity.
While in the Email Editor, access the Preview. There you can toggle the Desktop, Mobile and Text version, and the canvas will change accordingly.
