Ensure emails are readable by everyone, regardless of ability. Using clean, user-friendly templates is a win for senders and recipients.
Email accessibility is an age-old topic which has come back to the forefront recently thanks to impending EU legislation. But we shouldn’t worry about whether legislation applies to us, we should just ensure our emails are readable by everyone, regardless of ability. Using clean, user-friendly templates is a win for senders and recipients, as it always has been.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines have been developed to make web content more accessible to people with disabilities. Many of the guidelines are directly applicable to emails, such as:
- Provide text alternatives for non-text content.
- Provide captions and other alternatives for multimedia.
- Create content that can be presented in different ways, including by assistive technologies, without losing meaning.
- Make it easier for users to see and hear content.
- Make all functionality available from a keyboard.
- Make text readable and understandable.
This means using clean fonts at a decent size, line spacing and contrasting colour. It means using ‘alt text’ on any images. And it means having a clear, concise writing style that can be understood by the widest possible audience.
None of this is controversial, but we all fall into bad habits, and it’s useful to periodically reassess what we do.