Email trends that are inaccessible
What is the importance of accessibility in email marketing? Well, with 300 billion emails sent in 2022 coupled up with the classic stat that says “email has an ROI of $41 for every $1 spent”, that is a whole lot of potential revenue for brands to bring in.
But what if I told you that potentially 10-15% of your audience couldn’t even consume your content? That number is also a lot of revenue to leave on the table!
The World Health Organization has reported that 10% of Americans live with an invisible disability, and globally, 15% of individuals are impacted by some form of disability, invisible or not. The Email Markup Consortium, in July of 2022, analyzed 35k emails, of which 99.9% of them came back failing accessibility checks with either severe or critical errors. This report from the EMC was eye-opening for many email creators and highlighted a ton of work that we have to do as an industry to bring awareness to opportunities for us to do better.
When you, as an email marketer, create emails that are inaccessible for a percentage of your audience base, you are excluding individuals from being able to consume your content and leaving money on the table. Although not everything is about money, of course, sometimes it’s just about basic human decency and not having me need to squint at a size 8px font on an image-only email… can you tell what this journal article is going to be about?
One thing that Mark Robbins mentioned in his May 2022 UNSPAM talk in London when speaking on accessibility, that stuck with me, was that we may identify ourselves as able-bodied now, but infinite time in this state is not promised. We as an industry should take it upon ourselves to encourage higher standards for not only those that need to be able to consume content in a fair way, but for our future selves as well.
And so with that, I will walk through three trends that scream inaccessibility that I see in email way too often that I think are easy to fix, whether you are using a Drag and Drop editor, or coding an email from scratch with HTML (but if you do this hopefully you are using Parcel and using Parcel’s free accessibility checker).
Click here… click where?
For those that suffer from visual impairments that make consuming an email via their eyes difficult, they may lean on a screen reader to digest the content. According to AccessiBe, 7.3 million Americans use a screen reader to digest content. The use of click here is something I’ve written about previously, and it came to me as a pointer from another email geek. The learning was that consistently encouraging users to “click here”, or embedding links on words like “here” is completely inaccessible. In my writing, I summarize the reason to avoid doing this as such:
When links are compiled by the screen reader into a list format for the end-user to navigate through - the end-user could end up with a massive list of links that ends up looking something like:
Vs. a clean list of contextually embedded links that looks similar to:
Obviously, if you look at the second list you’ll know that you should go straight to the third link (duh, I really want a dog). But if the three links were compiled without context, and read out via a screen reader you might have wasted time navigating to all three articles before getting to the essential article of understanding how to convince my boyfriend how to get a dog. What a waste of time!
This trend isn’t something an accessibility checker is going to pick up. The onus is on the email marketer to ensure that their copy explains the concept well enough so that a screen reader can accurately pick up a link that is embedded contextually.
2. Image-only emails
Nothing gets me more fired up than an image-only email. As someone with little to no design chops, I get the appeal of leaning on a tool like Flodesk, or Canva to push out an image-only email. The limitations of HTML and CSS leave a lot to be desired. Custom font support is rare, sometimes GIF’s don’t work, it’s all a bit painful, isn’t it? But it’s about BALANCE, people!
My friend sent me a screenshot of this image-only email that landed in her inbox:
Alt text, also known as alternate text is meant to provide a gateway to making images accessible to screen readers. If I were to put this email into a screen reader, the screen reader would read out:
“The linked image cannot be displayed. The file may have been moved, renamed, or deleted. Verify that the link points to the correct file and location.”
Approximately 42 times. Are you going to purchase from this e-commerce company after hearing that? Probably not. After the second alt-text description, I am deleting that email and sending it so far into spam jail that that I hope to never interact with that brand again.
And you know what? All it should have taken was some extra TLC to write great alt-text descriptions!
My second qualm with image-only emails is that they don’t scale well on mobile. If you are building an email with only images, and there is text baked into an image, you best be sure it scales well when your email is opened on mobile. The number of times I’ve barely been able to read an email on mobile because the images were so small… I’d be rich if I had a penny each time.
Marketers, mobile as a device is popping off! You can’t ignore it!
3. Dark mode
The latest trend I see that really rocks my socks is dark mode. Although fairly out of our control half the time with how inconsistent devices and email clients are with the implementation of dark mode, we should still be aware of how color contrasts and font inversions impact the user’s end experience with our emails. A simple dark mode emulator can give you a glance at what your end user might be experiencing. Always worth the shot (aka. the QA).
What can we do to make emails more accessible?
We can educate ourselves. And we can test. This is knowledge worth sharing, and we shouldn’t gate it or keep it to ourselves to feel like we have a leg up over one another!
Parcel has a free suite of accessibility testing tools, and you can run your emails for no cost through them to understand if you have room to improve. Parcel also offers visual impairment previewing so you can emulate your email not only for visual impairements, but also dark mode.
When EMC’s report was released in July, the first issue was that a language attribute was not set in the HTML of many emails. I flagged this immediately at Parcel, and within 24 hours we automatically added lang=”en” to all base email templates. By raising this concern with the tool, we hopefully have started to create a better email standard for many out there.
If you send image-only emails, argue that they should include live text (don’t bake text into an image). You are losing out on a significant % of your revenue by doing this. For what, a pretty email that matches your brand font and color?
This is just the shortlist. There’s a long list of more items we should be doing to ensure our emails are accessible for all, such as using semantic HTML and ensuring your keyboard can navigate through the email seamlessly. I’m excited to continue working to understand more and sharing my learnings with the community!
TLDR
We need to do more yelling about accessibility issues when we see them. If it weren’t for other email geeks calling me out (privately, 1:1, of course) for things they noticed in my own campaigns, tweets, social posts, I wouldn’t have learned everything I know now. I am still learning and believe I have a long way to go.
If, in the next Email Markup Consortium report on accessibility we see a trend downward of the number of emails failing basic accessibility checks, I will consider it a small win for the industry. But in the meantime, read up on who your audience is, put yourself in their shoes, and create content for everyone — not just the able-bodied.