Ensuring the accessibility of your message means ensuring that all your recipients (including people with disabilities) will be able to read and understand your message correctly.

When you apply accessibility criteria, you make your message more readable and accessible to the people receiving it.

In addition to allowing people with disabilities to read your message correctly, you improve readability for everyone. This is therefore a criterion not to be overlooked when designing your messages!

What are the main accessibility criteria?

Many articles discuss this topic on the web, but we strongly recommend reading the article written by our friends at BadSender (accessible here).

This article provides a comprehensive overview of best practices, including:

• Specifying the language of the message to allow for the most pleasant possible reading aloud for your recipients using screen readers (see below how to specify it in OxiMailing).

• Making your texts readable, including ensuring sufficient color contrast between the text and the background it is placed on, using fonts of a sufficient size (minimum 14px), aligning your paragraphs to the left, etc.

• Specifying alternative text for all your images. Alternative text (“alt” for the initiated) is essential. A screen reader encountering an image will not be able to read the text contained on it (or even describe it). It will therefore tend to read the alternative text. If it is not specified, the behavior is not certain: the screen reader may, for example, read the name of the image aloud! A perfect example of the importance of accessibility for everyone, alternative text is also displayed instead of images when they cannot be displayed. By checking this point, you make your message more readable for everyone!

Many other points need to be checked, including technical points (BadSender lists more than 20!)… but good news for you, OxiMailing users, we already handle the vast majority! 😊

How can OxiMailing help me check the accessibility of my message?

We have been working for a long time to integrate best practices into the messages created on our platform.

For example, our messages already contain everything necessary for perfect display regardless of the reading tool.

We also offer you our Email Preview tool for free so you can ensure the rendering of your message on over 70 mail clients without even having to send it.

Following the publication of the aforementioned article, we decided to further improve our messages by automatically addressing almost all the points (in terms of HTML code, encoding, tables…).

The next step was to allow you, OxiMailing users, to benefit from an analysis tool, easily accessible and easily understandable for all the points we could not automate (for example, we cannot decide on the alternative text for one of your images, you will understand!).

To do this, we have integrated an accessibility verification tool.

You can simply launch it in the message editor by clicking on “Accessibility” and then “Check message accessibility”.

There, you can specify the language of your message (by default OxiMailing’s language but you can change it) and you will receive a list of recommendations indicating the points that need to be corrected to have a “perfect” message.

This tool will improve based on your feedback and the work we are doing on accessibility in the email domain. Feel free to share your comments on this by contacting us!