Email

Whether you are writing a simple email to a colleague in Outlook or using a third-party platform to create a newsletter that is intended for wide distribution, you need to ensure that your email communications can be read and understood without presenting barriers to people with disabilities. It is important to note that when it comes to digital communication, accessibility is usability. By following these simple but effective techniques, your email communication will be more accessible to people with disabilities and more readable for everyone.

Providing a meaningful subject line for your message allows users to easily identify the purpose of the email, makes it easier to search for and locate if the recipient needs to refer back to it, and allows for easier tracking of replies.

Instead of:

  • Subject: Question
  • Subject: Monthly Newsletter
  • Subject: Following up

Consider:

  • Subject: Question about purchasing process
  • Subject: Monthly Newsletter, February 2022
  • Subject: Following up regarding event venue

Pay attention to your choice of fonts, font colors, and backgrounds. It is best to keep your email as simple as possible.

Text

  • Use a simple, sans serif font, with text no smaller than 11-12 points.
  • Avoid using patterned or colored backgrounds.
  • Keep paragraphs short and concise, using built-in bulleted and numbered lists to help organize content.

Layout

  • Avoid using tables as a layout device unless you can modify the HTML source code to add the role="presentation" attribute to the <table> tag.
  • Use built-in heading styles (in Outlook for example) or HTML heading tags to organize content.

 

Choose colors with sufficient contrast, especially when considering text colors. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) recommend a minimum of 4.5:1 contrast between the text and the background color for normal size text, and a minimum of 3:1 for large (>18pt) text. For more information about color contrast, visit the Digital Accessibility: Color section of this guide. 

Be sure to consult the Tufts Brand Guidelines for color recommendations that are both on-brand and accessible.

  • Use descriptive, plain language links, for example use Tufts University instead of https://tufts.edu or click here.
  • Avoid having two links with the same text that go to different places, for example repeated use of "read more" or "register now".
  • If a linked image is adjacent to a text link, and they go to the same URL, they should be combined into a single link to avoid redundancy.
  • Use email attachments only when necessary.
  • Attached documents must also be accessible.

Alternative text, also referred to as "alt text", is a textual description of graphical content. This text allows blind or low-vision users of screen reading software to be able to understand the non-textual content contained in objects such as images, charts, or graphs. Alternative text should only be included for graphical content that conveys information. Purely decorative graphical content can be marked as decorative and will be ignored by the screen reader. The method for marking an image as decorative varies depending on your email software. In Outlook, for example, there is a checkbox in the Alt Text property of the image that allows you to mark it as decorative. In HTML, you would add the alt="" attribute to the <img> tag.

Alternative text should be:

  • Concise (usually no more than a sentence or two)
  • Equivalent (describing the purpose of the graphical content)
  • Non-redundant (do not repeat information already provided in visible text)

Note also that you should not include "image of..." or "picture of...", as the screen reader will already announce the object type.