Pandemic Related Email Inaccessible To The Blind

In this episode of the iCantCU Podcast, I talk about email I received from businesses related to the coronavirus that were completely inaccessible to me and other visually impaired people. Usually, when I get email from retailers, credit card companies, and other businesses it is just frustrating that I can’t read them with a screen reader, but now with the outbreak, they are much more important and the fact that I can’t get the info within the email could put me at greater risk for contracting the virus.

Best Practices For Email

If you are doing a business-related email blast, please don’t include text within images unless you use alt tags with the same information that is in the graphic The alt tag should contain the exact same text that is part of the graphic. It should also contain a description of anything else pictured. For example, if it is a dish of food, you can name the dish, “Maryland crab cake platter with homemade french fries, remoulade, and mixed greens salad.” You can go into a greater description of the picture if you like. If you do, you may be rewarded by Google, as alt tag info generally help with SEO. You could add something like: “The large, jumbo lump crab cake is golden brown. The remoulade is pale orange in color and made fresh daily from a family recipe. The golden-brown fries are fresh cut every hour from Idaho Russets.”

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