Email Accessibility
Email Accessibility
You may have never given your email a second thought when it comes to accessibility before, but to ensure you reach your entire audience, it's important to apply the basic accessibility guidelines you learned about in previous modules to your emails as well.
It all begins with how you send your email. Have you ever received an email with a large number of recipients in the "To" or "Carbon copy (Cc)" fields to then be graced with additional reply-alls that have nothing to do with you (When is reply all appropriate?)? Maybe it felt something like this video: What Reply-All E-mail Would Feel Like in Real Life | Shorts & Murmurs | The New Yorker (The New Yorker YouTube).
Imagine not only being inconvenienced with these irrelevant emails but having to listen to each of those email addresses or names being read out by a screen reader.
Blind carbon copy (Bcc) is not only a great tool to reduce the number of unwanted or unnecessary replies from others or for security or privacy (prevents others from seeing who the email was sent to), but it also makes your email more easily accessible for those using assistive technologies such as a screen reader.
While you have access to the accessibility checkers within programs such as Outlook, we do not want to encourage you to see it as a starting point. You should see the accessibility checker as a polishing tool, just like spell-check. If you’re relying on the accessibility checker, you are for sure missing things because this is a tool, and just like every other tool, you have to know how to use it and how it’s supposed to function.
Accessibility in Email Marketing (Intuit MailChimp)
Add a numbered or bulleted list to a message in Outlook (Microsoft Support)
Email Campaigns (Washington State Board for Community & Technical Colleges)
Make your Outlook email accessible to people with disabilities (Microsoft Support)
Outlook (Microsoft Learn)
Show, hide, and view the Bcc (blind carbon copy) field in Outlook (Microsoft Support)
Use built-in headings and styles in Outlook (Microsoft Support)