Tips to Make Your Emails Accessible

It’s a given that email marketing can help you to build strong relationships with your subscribers.
This happens when you write good content and give your readers valuable information that helps them to achieve their goals. On top of that, you should make sure that all your emails are accessible to anyone.

Your list may include people with visual impariments or aging users:  why should they be excluded? It only takes a little effort to make sure that you are sending accessible emails.

Here are some tips and techiques for making them as accessible as possible:

  • Provide a link to a plain text or Rich Test version of your email.
  • Add alternative text when including images in your email.
  • Use fonts easy to read, e.g. Arial is more accessible than Times New Roman
  • Ensure that font size is sufficient, not less than 12-point type.
  • Choose strong color contrast, avoiding dark backgrounds – use the COLOR attribute of the FONT element for text and the BGCOLOR attribute for backgrounds
  • Keep your email design short, and easy to scan.
  • Avoid elements such as blinking text or animated images.
  • If your message is included in a table, make sure that all related content is contained in a single table cell, if the table has more than one column.
  • Choose bold instead of italics or underlining.
  • Write clear descriptive link text, avoid “Click here” link text.
  • If you send HTML emails, follow the same accessibility guidelines as for web pages (WCAG 1.0 guidelines, priority II).

Read other resources on how to make emails accessible:

– For plain text emails  see Headstar
– For HTML emails see Rnib