Short note: Why it’s important for promotional emails to be accessible and not text embedded into an image?

These days, almost every day, we will end up receiving an email about a promotional offer but quite often they are image based. If you are a user with vision impairment, you cannot read that email with a screen reader. If you are viewing that email on a mobile device, often, images does not get loaded or take a lot of time to load due to poor connectivity.

Today (though not really new), I have observed email applications specially GMail uses some sort of intelligence to filter if an email is spam, if it decides as spam, it doesn’t by default load images of that email. Here is a screenshot of a promotional email I have recently received and how GMail displays it:

Screenshot from GMail

This Screen short displays a warning from GMail saying that this email may be spam and hence images are not loaded. Though there is an option to load images, what if user is a beginner or someone who does not know such features. In this scenario, actually messaging is lost. Fabulous emails can be generated using HTML and not really just as embedded into an image.

Read The ultimate guide for accessible emails

Srinivasu Chakravarthula

Srinivasu Chakravarthula is an accessibility evangelist for 12+ years. Accessibility is not just his profession but something that is very close to his heart. Srinivasu believes that technology plays an important role to make lives of people with disabilities independent. Srinivasu is recipient of Yahoo! Ratna and NCPEDP MphasiS Universal Design Award. Srinivasu is Certified Web Accessibility Specialist by International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP). Srinivasu is also an individual Professional member of IAAP. Visit his personal website to learn more.

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