The subscribers who can't read your email

In today's Mailbites, we talk about email accessibility, the unglamorous craft of making your emails readable for everyone, and why a meaningful slice of your list might be getting nothing from the message you worked hard on.

Now, onto today's story.

The Story

Some portion of your subscribers, a larger portion than you'd guess, reads email differently than you do. They bump the font size up because their eyes aren't what they were. They use a screen reader that speaks the email aloud. They have low vision and need real contrast, or they're colour-blind, or they're just reading on a glary phone in bright sun. For all of them, design choices that look fine on your monitor can turn your email into a wall they can't get through.

This matters for the obvious reason, that these are real people and customers who deserve to read what you send. It also matters for a reason marketers respond to: an email nobody can read is an email that doesn't convert, and you're paying to send it anyway. Accessibility isn't charity. It's making sure the message actually lands for everyone you sent it to.

The good news is that most of it is small, cheap, and overlaps neatly with just making better email. A handful of habits cover the bulk of it:

• Write alt text on your images. If an image doesn't load, or a screen reader is doing the reading, the alt text is the only thing that survives. And since plenty of inboxes block images by default, this helps far more people than just those using assistive tech. An image-only email with no alt text is, to a real share of your list, a blank email.
• Use real text, not text baked into pictures. Words trapped inside an image can't be enlarged, can't be read aloud, and can't be resized. Keep your message as actual text.
• Mind your contrast. Pale grey text on a white background looks elegant to a designer with a calibrated monitor and tiring to almost everyone else. Give text enough contrast to read comfortably on a cheap phone in daylight.
• Don't rely on colour alone. "Click the green button" fails for a colour-blind reader. Label things with words, not just hues.
• Keep a logical structure and a sensible size. A single clear column, generous text, real headings. The same things that make email good on a phone make it usable with a screen reader.

You'll notice almost none of this is a tradeoff. Alt text, real text, good contrast, clear structure: these make your email better for everyone, not just the people who need them most. Build for the subscriber reading differently, and you build a better email for the whole list.

Until next week,

Ani