Empathy and inclusion are among the most essential tools for a marketer. And they come into play whenever you consider accessibility when designing email campaigns and other digital marketing content.
Having empathy means being able to put yourself in another’s place. However, sometimes it is easier said than done. How can you be sure that the emails you are creating and developing are accessible?
Accessibility testing involves analyzing digital content, such as web pages, emails, and user interfaces (UIs), to ensure that people with disabilities of various kinds can use and interact with it. These types of tests reveal how email campaigns and templates can be improved so that all subscribers have the opportunity to connect with what you send them.
Why it’s important to check email accessibility?
Investing in accessibility checking tools isn’t just a matter of empathizing with all of our subscribers, it’s also a very good practice for business. Whatever your target market, people with disabilities will be part of it.
The World Health Organization (WHO) states that 2.2 billion people worldwide have some form of visual impairment. As baby boomers enter their sixth decade, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) projects that rates of blindness and visual impairment in the United States will double in the coming decades.
The fact that your emails are accessible can be decisive. This is especially true with certain target markets and brands, but whatever your case, there is no doubt that a percentage of your subscriber list is going to be made up of people with disabilities.
If you care about deliverability enough to take it seriously, accessibility should also be an element to consider. Just as subscribers won’t read emails that don’t arrive in their inbox, they won’t be able to react to unreadable emails either.
Without the information that accessibility tests provide, you’re driving at night with your lights off. You can try to make wild guesses about how recipients will react to your brand emails, but why play a guessing game when you can test the accessibility of your messages?
Here are a few useful accessibility testing tools for marketing teams.
Many accessibility tools can be used to test digital campaigns. Those in this first section are designed primarily for web developers. However, since they often offer the ability to enter the content in question as a URL or HTML code, they can also be useful to creators of marketing emails.
– Accessibility Insights
– Accessible Metrics
– AccessiBe
– Lighthouse
– Wave
– SortSite
Among these tools, here we are going to quickly check on the AccessiBe review.
AccessiBe:
This is one of the paid options for accessibility testing. It is a development suite that contains two apps. On the one hand, there is the Accessibility Interface, on the front, which evaluates the user interface of a site and allows visitors to make modifications based on their needs.
Then there is the AI part of the suite, which works on the backend. The AI-powered component focuses on optimization requirements for screen readers and keyboard navigation. Plans scale to website size and are available starting at $490/year for sites with less than 1,000 pages.
That means, with AccessBe, it is possible to achieve full compliance with an automated solution.