Email accessibility isn’t a “nice to have” feature in your email messages. For many companies, it’s a legal requirement. If your emails are not accessible to people with physical or cognitive limitations or disorders, you can be vulnerable to legal action like fines or lawsuits.
That’s why RPE Origin and its staff of email designers and developers have gone all in on making sure every email we send is as accessible as possible. We also produced a free, easy-to-follow guide, ADA Inclusive Email Marketing: The Hidden Benefits of Inclusive Design and a follow-up blog post (“Email accessibility means email for everyone“) to get you up to speed quickly on accessibility.
Two more reasons why accessibility matters
Beyond understanding what accessibility is all about and why it matters, we need to think about some wider issues that accessibility raises. We checked with RPE Origin Chief Creative Officer Evan Diaz, who is one of the leads on accessibility in email design and development, on two key questions that often come up in client discussions. Here’s what he says:
Q. What legal or brand-equity issues does a brand or company face if their email messages fail accessibility standards?
Evan: It depends on the company. If you’re an ecommerce company, you probably don’t face the same legal consequences. You’ll miss out on sales and other conversions. It also makes your brand look bad if you send me an email that doesn’t work in dark mode.
If I have dark mode on, and I open your email at night, and it’s glaringly bright, my retinas might not recover. If nothing else I’ll just delete it, so that’s a wasted email.
A number of our clients are in heavily regulated fields like financial services and healthcare, and they have different rules. If you rely on email for regulated activities, and people who have vision or motor limitations can’t act on them, you are exposing your company to legal action because you are discriminating against a protected class.
Some could be lawsuits brought by individuals, but you also have the risk of being targeted by a class-action lawsuit, or a significant federal fine. It depends on the specifics of a case. Still, no company wants to be opening itself up to this, especially if it’s so easy and cheap to just do it the right way.
Legal teams need to be up to date on ADA and other accessibility standards, too. Based on what I see in my inbox, if the legal teams for those companies saw what their emails were doing, they would not let their people send out emails!
Everyone should know about accessibility: It goes beyond designing an email and checking that it meets standards. I recently saw an email that another agency sent out for one of our clients, which had an offer expiring on one date, but the alt text that describes the image, and which a screen reader would pick up on, had a different date. And that legal had been reviewed by the legal team!
That’s one reason why your legal team must be up to date on ADA guidelines and legal responsibilities if they review email campaigns before they go out. But you also need email developers and designers who are trained in accessible design and who know what to look for in quality assurance to make sure everything is done correctly.
That can be tough if you have a small team. And even having an agency isn’t enough if the agency people who are checking things on your behalf aren’t trained in this specialty.
If you’re a healthcare company sending out emails like the one that had incorrect information in the alt text or designs that colorblind people can’t see, that’s like having a doctor’s office without a wheelchair ramp or automated doors. You’re sending the message that you don’t care about these customers.
What’s the best way to transition from convention to accessible email design?
Evan: It begins with the managers and marketing people who review test emails for the company or client. They might see the pretty art that their designers created, but they won’t see how the email functions when their recipients are viewing it.
The team members are looking to make sure the image and copy are correct, maybe that links work, that they go to the right landing page, or the CTA is correct. But they’re probably using their company computers to review the email. The email clients on those computers are likely set to view images automatically and identify the domain sending the test email as an approved sender.
Brand people end up viewing the email one way, while their subscribers view it another. About half of email subscribers block images by default. That means they’ll see just the alt text, if it’s there. If marketers don’t view the email with images off, they won’t see whether the alt text is wrong, incomplete, or missing.
They won’t use a screen reader to hear what their emails sound like when an automated voice reads the coding. Believe me; it’s pretty bad. (Listen to an example here.)
So, apart from legal issues, a company needs to have someone who knows what to check for and does it regularly. Many of our clients don’t have the time or staff to do it themselves because their teams are stretched so thin.
Sound like you? You’re not alone! As we said in the beginning, we’re all in on helping companies manage accessibility issues. We created these three resources to help you get up to speed quickly:
- Free guide: ADA Inclusive Email Marketing: The Hidden Benefits of Inclusive Design.
- Blog post: “Email accessibility means email for everyone”)
- Blog post: 10 steps to more accessible email
Wrapping up and next steps
While you’re at it, share this post with your design and legal teams to be sure everyone’s on board with the expectations, principles, and practices that go into accessibility. If you need more help, we’re always happy to talk with you at no obligation. Contact us to discover how our services can help you get even greater value from your email marketing program.
Recent Comments