Preamble: this is a humor post and contains a lot of sarcasm. Any resemblance to real people or situations is intentional.
Fashionable subjects come and go with the seasons. And here I must confess to a certain weariness. When it comes to email template creationAfter months of all-out eco-design, accessibility is back with a vengeance.
Please don't think I don't care - quite the contrary.
What annoys me is all the fuss about theEuropean Accessibility Act (EAA) or the work to update the Référentiel Général d'Amélioration de l'Accessibilité (RGAA). And even more so in the microcosm of email marketing.
The few questions that come out in the rush and panic:
- Is it possible to my email template is accessible ?
- Is my email builder accessible?
TL;DR: Yes, there's a good chance they will be. Accessibility problems will very rarely come from there.*
Instead of thinking in terms of tools and technosolutionism, we need to take a good look at ourselves and analyze our practices.
The first accessibility problem often comes from a more strategic level: branding.
Your visual identity is often itself the direct cause of accessibility problems. It's hard to fight when an advertiser arrives with a charter from a major branding agency and you "just" have to transpose it into email. It may be visually polished, but if the contrasts are out of whack, you're going to have to pull out all the stops.
So what do we do? Change the values, even if it means introducing inconsistencies between the various communication media? Absolutely not! The new charter is hot and it's been done by a super prestigious agency, it can only be quali. OKAY
Second accessibility issue: the use made of tools
Your design and template are RGAA compliant (with or without builder), but now the operational teams will have to use it and add content to create their messages: text, images, links, emojis galore and sometimes they'll even want "dynamic" content (carousels, forms, videos...).
Surprise, the builder is not a magic tool.
If we're not aware of the necessary settings, we introduce accessibility problems ourselves.
Need help?
Reading content isn't everything. The best way is to talk to us.
This can range from the obvious: semantic tags to prioritize text content, the use of a alt on an image... but also the "fun and cool" things that marketing often wants. Yes, background images, exotic typography, animated gifs and all those other gimmicks that will blow the accessibility of your e-mails out of the water if you don't plan a fallback solution.
If you also have a non-oriented email builder Design System (cuckoo Stripo), so you can change all the colors to suit your personal taste: cuckoo for buttons in white text on a pale pink background!
At this stage, the email still hasn't gone out, do we agree?
Assuming you've done everything right, you'll export the HTML and import it into your favorite campaign management tool. The latter will parse the code and magically, for many of them, take the liberty of re-writing anything that seems wrong or unnecessary (good-bye attribute role="presentation" on your layout tables).
I could go on and tell you about the interpretation of this same HTML (which is no longer that of your template) by e-mail providers (inboxes), but clearly that's not what you're interested in.
What interests you is the tool. The template, the builder.
Most hammers do the job well. However, if you take a hammer to drive a screw, the result is bound to be splintered.
If you really care about the accessibility of your emails, here are a few tips:
For decision-makers (because this is often where the problems start): stop validating on "Wahou! Too good, too beautiful!" and dwell on glitter. Right from the design phase, even for branding, think accessibility.
For operational staff in production: train yourself and get to know the constraints of the medium.
Many people don't like this word because it sounds "negative", but it defines the framework within which you'll be able to evolve. These are the rules of the game. And when you're playing a game together, it's best to play by the rules.
* The comment received on Linkedin is very accurate.. There's no point in pitting editors and users against each other. What I'm trying to say here is a half-hearted attempt to highlight the fact that auditing the accessibility of an email template or builder outside its intended use renders the audit partial.
