Your daily frequent11y newsletter, brought to you by @ChrisBAshton:
Accessibility Report July 2022
This is the first ever accessibility report from the Email Markup Consortium, intended to report on the state of a11y in the email industry.
99.9% out of 35,604 HTML emails tested contain accessibility issues categorised as “Serious” or “Critical”. These emails were from multiple industries, in multiple languages (50% non-English). The testing was performed via the Parcel accessibility checker.
The main issues were:
- 86.1% of emails lacked a
langattribute on the first child of the<body>element. Apparently this has to be done (alongside adding to the<html>attribute, which 78.8% of emails lacked) as some email clients strip parts of the code before displaying it. - 85.7% of emails lacked a
<h1>heading. - 78.4% of emails used a
<table>for formatting, but did not set theirroletopresentationornone. - 61.6% of emails lacked discernible text for their links (e.g. using an image as a link, but providing no
altattribute for the image). - There are several more issues highlighted, each present in 9-45% of all emails.
Emails are a different beast to the rest of the web, and tend not to get much focus on their accessibility. I’m pleased there is an initiative aiming to change that.
Prefer longer newsletters? You can subscribe to week11y, fortnight11y or even month11y updates! Every newsletter gets the same content; it is your choice to have short, regular emails or longer, less frequent ones. Curated with ♥ by developer @ChrisBAshton.
