Not only do pandemic and legal enforcement bring this issue to the forefront. There are some other reasons why email design accessibility matters.
• Any kind of disability, even a temporary one, makes it hard to interact with email. Therefore, you won’t get a proper response on your strategy and campaign, to say nothing about driving traffic to the landing page.
• Almost 1.3 billion people worldwide live with some form of impairment. It is a colossal share of the market that you overlook.
• Inaccessibility in email design may lead to a disappointed, frustrated, or angry customer. For example, if you do not provide your images with ALTs, people whose email readers ditch all kinds of visuals by default won’t see your smart pictures, backgrounds, and accompanying material. Therefore, you will lose the click, the sale, and damage or ruin your relationships with the contact.
Email accessibility matters on all levels. It is increasingly vital for your business to thrive, to say nothing about its unintended benefits. Therefore, it should be taken into account each time you create a digital newsletter.
I think this idea has seemed into the global developer consciousness, but just to be clear: accessibility isn’t just about building digital things that work for blind people using screen readers, although that’s important. There are infinite variations of disabilities, temporary and permanent.
On this site that is vaguely about collecting ideas around email productivity, I’m curious both about email construction accessibility and how that effects people’s ability to deal with your one email effectively, but also about disabilities and how they effect people’s ability to be productive with email as a whole. I know almost nothing about this.
One response to “Email Design Accessibility: Why It Is Important to Improve It”
I hope you’ll follow up on this topic because I’m interested too. Last year I was in a car accident and couldn’t walk for 3 months, even with crutches. I had to use a knee scooter. I have an aunt who is in a wheel chair and so I’ve always considered myself to be more “in the know” about accessibility issues in the real world. Well, until I lived it I just don’t know how difficult every single thing is. You go to a restaurant, sit down, and then find out the restroom is in the basement and there’s no elevator. Or they put the ramp going all the way around the building, so if you want to enter you have to exhaust yourself because you can’t go up two steps. I think about this experience frequently as I’m creating for the web. I know I won’t be able to truly understand what it’s like to have an impairment when trying to navigate the web, but I try to educate myself as much as possible. At the very least, I don’t want to create the email equivalent of a ramp around the building to go up two steps.