Email Marketing or eDM (electronic direct mail) is a fundamental part of audience engagement with new and existing customers. Not only do we use email to inform customers about new products or services but emails are increasingly used to communicate important policy changes.
So it’s vital that the people in your audience are able to access the information contained within the emails.
Typically falling within the domain of marketing and communications, eDM templates are often overlooked for accessbility compliance.
To meet basic accessibility requirements the email must:
- Have a logical reading order
- Use true headings styles available in html (not just text styled to look like headings)
- Have sufficient colour contrast for all text
- Have text alternatives for images
If not created and tested for accessibility, users of assistive technology or people with vision, mobility, cognitive or hearing impairments may not be able interpret the information in a meaningful and useful way that helps them understand what your organisation is wishing to communicate.
They could also be excluded from important call to actions, making your communications virtually ineffective to a significant and growing portion of the population.
Media Access Australia can help your organisation understand where barriers might exist in its digital communications by evaluating and testing emails in a number of browsers and email programs, using different devices and assistive technology.
We also advise on supplementary best practice techniques that support customer communications, end to end.
Useful resource: Media Access Australia has created a sample creative brief to enable marketers to document their accessibility requirements for the creation of an accessible email template