Over the past few years, content on the web has become more accessible, while at the same time inviting more scrutiny from activists when businesses aren’t ADA compliant. Accessibility for email is having its long overdue moment as well, as more marketers and email developers look to bring the same standards to your inbox.

Unfortunately though, there are a lot of marketers who want to make accessibility standards, while few who are following through. In a survey by Litmus, 77% of brands want to have accessibility standards, yet only 8% of those surveyed say they follow best practices.

This is unfortunate since world wide about 15% of the population has at least one disability according to the WHO. Of those people, roughly 285 million have a visual impairment, which means 285 million people might have a hard time viewing your email if it’s not accessibly designed.

But accessibility isn’t limited to vision. Accessible email also serves those with physical and cognitive limitations that range from temporary, like a broken wrist, to lifelong, like cerebral palsy. There’s no end to the number of combinations of different limitations someone might have to overcome.

It’s worth mentioning here that when we talk about accessibility standards for marketing it can feel like marketers are only doing it to boost their audience or avoid being called out for not doing it. But any decent email marketer is already making sure to only target consumers who have said, “Yes, I want this content in my inbox.” Individuals with disabilities are the same as any consumer group. They have wants and needs and things they want to buy. By not allowing them to access the content you’re sending, you are denying them those very human experiences.

How Did We Do It?

You don’t have to be an expert on every disability or assistive tool to create your accessibility standards. At Nebo, one of the first things we did was explore ways to experience having a disability and the impact that may have on how we read email. You can do this by turning on VoiceOver and letting it read through your emails.

If this was the way you interacted with the email, are you still getting the most out of it? Does it convey all the information, both text and images, in the same way as reading through it yourself? What if you had to navigate through the content using only the Tab key? 

Our phones have a host of accessibility options that can be turned on and experimented with as well. This can be a good exercise to go beyond the inbox and see where else accessibility can make a difference in how users perceive content and the challenges they might face. 

For instance, if you bump up the size of the text, it’ll be easier to see but also take up more space, which could alter the layout or force you to scroll more than you’d like to. This could be even more of an issue if you have a disability like dyspraxia that makes fine motor control difficult. So the solution could be to reduce the amount of copy over all, something we’ll later see is a recommended best practice.

When creating emails for accessibility, there are a lot of intersecting potential issues to consider. The solution is almost never just a design or code consideration, but a combination of all the elements of email.

Bringing It All Together

Once we had an understanding of who we were designing for, it was time to put together the standards. While there are no universal standards for email accessibility, there are some we could work off of. However, by making our own standards, we ensured that every rule on them was something we understood and knew was applicable to us and our clients. Each line item became more than a checkbox.