Make Awesome Email

Legibility and Accessibility in Email

Accessibility in email is important. It’s the art of making sure our message gets across for everyone, regardless of their abilities. Accessibility is also useful because it improves the experience for everyone, not just those who rely on it. Using Microsoft’s Inclusive Design Guidelines, here are some considerations:

Audio

We don’t do audio in email, but consider if people are viewing videos on a landing page, what is the experience without sound? Use captions.

Visual

We can do some things with code to make email work better in screen readers and other assistive technologies. Helpfully, this also improves the experience when Siri and Alexa are reading out emails.

We should also consider those with colour blindness and other visual issues - do we have enough visual contrast?

Do the animated GIFs we use present issues for those with epilepsy?

An all image email is going to be very hard for people with visual challenges. Screenreaders can’t read text that is trapped inside an image. If you have the choice between using a brand font in an image, and HTML text that is accessible, it’s more responsible to pick the latter.

Dexterity

Is our email easy to engage with for those who don’t have the precise control of a mouse? Can you navigate it just using tabs? Is it easy for people to tap a link if they have motor challenges?

Cognitive

Is our message easy to understand — and not triggering — for those with anxiety, dyslexia or autism? Some of the marketing “tricks” involve things like building false scarcity — that might not be the most responsible thing to do.