Creating Accessible Emails

What are accessible emails?

People often forget about making emails accessible for everyone. Since emails are one of the main ways we talk to each other every day, it is important to make sure everyone can easily read and understand them. The following tips are the best ways to create accessible emails using Gmail.

How do I create accessible emails in Gmail?

Gmail supports the use of screen readers and other devices for accessibility. See using Gmail with a screen reader for more information.

Graphics and Images

To make your emails easy for everyone to read, it is best to avoid using images or graphics. Pictures can be hard for some people to view, and they won’t load at all if a person has images blocked in their email account.

If you do need to use a picture, never put all of your important information inside the image itself. You should also add alt text (alternative text). Alt text describes the picture so screen readers can read it out loud to people who are visually impaired, and it stands in for the image if the file fails to load.

To add alt text in Gmail:

1. Click and drag an image from your computer into the body of your email.
2. Click the image, and options will appear at the bottom.
3. Select “Edit alt text”.
   
4. By default, Gmail will include the file name as the alternative text. You can delete this and add your own descriptive text. See “Creating Accessible Content” for more information on using alt text.
   
5. Select [Apply].

Links

When you add links to an email, you should use words that clearly describe where the link goes. This is important because screen readers read these links out loud to users. Pasting a long web address (URL) looks messy and is hard to listen to. On the other hand, using generic phrases like “Click Here” doesn’t give the reader any clues about where the link will take them. Clear text matters because screen readers often pull all the links out of an email to create a separate list for the user. If your links just say “Click Here” over and over, that list becomes completely useless.

1. Select the text that requires the hyperlink, then click the [Hyperlink] button.
2. The selected text will appear in the Text to Display box, and this will become the hyperlinked text.

Accessible Text

• Format documents with high contrast, such as black text on a white background, to provide higher readability to those with low vision.
• Ensure the font size is sufficiently large; a minimum of 12 points is recommended.
• Add an underline or bold font to convey meaning in place of just using color to create emphasis or meaning.