The Email Accessibility Gap Is a Revenue & Compliance Problem | Sarah Gallardo

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English (US)

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Welcome to the making sense of martech. I'm Jacqueline Freedman Let's go down the rabbit hole together. Sarah Gallardo has spent over 12 years crafting email campaigns for fortune 500 companies, and she's become one of the industry's fiercest advocates for accessibility. Not because it's legally required, but because she's watched companies leave billions on the table by ignoring it.

Here's what doesn't make sense to me 77% of brands claim they prioritize email accessibility, yet only 8% actually follow best practices. That is not a gap. That's a chasm. And she has been in the trenches of enterprise marketing tech. Watching this disconnect play out daily, the industry we're in talks a lot about inclusion while systematically designing experiences that lock out 1.3 billion disabled people worldwide, people who collectively control over 1 trillion in annual disposable income.

It's mind-boggling. But let me introduce Sarah real quick. She is the associate principal technical producer at Stitch, specializing in email accessibility, after her more than 12 years building high performing email campaigns at Oracle and Epsilon Casual, and she also earned her CPA, CC, which is a Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies in 2020, which is a certification demonstrating foundational knowledge of digital accessibility.

She also became a trusted tester in 2023, meaning she is certified to test websites and software for accessibility in accordance with official standards. Her accessibility journey began in 2014, when her youngest child was diagnosed with dyslexia, and that experience led her through advocacy work and revealed uncomfortable parallels between educational and digital accessibility barriers.

Welcome, Sara. Thank you for being here. Thank you so much for inviting me on. I'm so excited about being here. Me too. All right. I want to dive in with you. So let's start with some quick rapid fires. What was your first martech tool? As a developer, I really don't do a lot in actual tools, which is scandalous to say out loud, but, um, so technically my first tool was Dreamweaver.

Love Dreamweaver still to this day.

00:02:09 — 00:18:52

Yeah, I don't know why Dreamweaver gets so much. It's excellent for email. One of your children's diagnoses change your career path forever. How did advocating for them change your perspective at work? So it really wasn't until I started having conversations with like, coworkers and directors and executives clients where I would bring up accessibility and they'd kind of be like, oh, that doesn't really matter.

An email, you know, and just kind of like, sweep it over, sweep it over the rug, or they'd have all these assumptions, especially like the well, that's what the viewing browser is for. You know, they'd have these, like, all these myths that were built up. And I would just be like, it's that true? Like, who says that that's true, you know what I mean?

And so they're creating. Yeah. Like there's just a lot of the stuff that I started then doing the research and then being able to say actually, well. Actually, you know, push those glasses back. But it was felt so much like attending IEP meetings where my kid's teacher is like, you know, they're not doing their homework because they're lazy.

And I'm like, no, that's that's not the issue. I know this kid. They're not lazy. But like, just all these kind of mismatches between what I think is true and what is actually true just became really hard to ignore without a doubt. And that core misunderstanding is not only frustrating, I would imagine as a parent, but also as the child and seeing an industry in all the industries not paying attention in the right way.

At least in America, the Ada American Disability Act is important and kind of going against the law. If you don't do it correctly, it really is. And there's there's a lot moving on that subject right now. But I do think the underlying core is that our emails need to be accessible for much more than just legal reasons, but I'm sure we'll get more into that later.

But there's so much built into it that just makes it what it should be. Is just an automatic yes, without a doubt. Okay, I'm going to ask you a spicy question. What is the most inaccessible email you've received from a major brand recently? It is always retail. I personally try not to name brands because I feel like it's not respecting the journey of the marketing team.

Part of the job is to advocate for that, to get them to understand that it's an issue. Part of why I'm here, right. But so many retail brands are all images, and then they have all these linked images without any alt text. And it's just such a giant mess. I just want to like, scream it to the heavens. Like, come on, God, it's just some alt text.

It doesn't even have to be perfect. It just has to be so much more than what you're doing right now. So that with all of those, all of the retail emails are in the trash bin for me, that makes sense. Well, if you don't name names, I will. And. Top of mind for me is actually GAAP. What do you think? Have you seen those emails?

I did complain so much about get emails like. And I used to shop there all the time. I know that they're working on things, but they're all movable ink emails anymore. I think they just produce all of their emails and send them directly to movable ink to populate. And so it's all the movable ink defaults for the alt text.

So it's all display images to see real time content over and over and over and over again through the entire email. And it really makes me angry. Almost as angry as the gigantic animated GIFs that they also send that are like 30MB or whatever. It's awful. Oh, goodness. Okay, now that we've successfully found a company that has room for improvement, I would like to set the stage beyond just one company.

So email in general is generating. And this is like the most well-known stat, but it's 36 to 1 ROI and people with disabilities control over 1 trillion in annual disposable income. And so that math just doesn't add up to me. And so I want to address this elephant in the room. The business case is airtight.

Why is it not working? Why are we not getting more accessibility in our emails? I think it's on a couple of different fronts. I think the people making the decisions believe a lot of the myths that exist in our world. You know, the viewing browser, like, you know, solves all accessibility. And that if you have alt text, that's all you need kind of thing.

But then I also think that it's such a fast paced industry trying to pull someone's ear enough to get them to listen, to get them to pay attention to, you know, the very obvious stats that we have. You know, the 28% of all adults have some kind of disability. You know, all of these. The Black Friday season of 2021 lost about $121 billion because the websites were not accessible.

You know, that was kind of the estimated loss. And so there's all these good reasons. But then there's still people like me that just feel like I'm like waving my arms forever, saying, hey, just do this thing. It's I think there's also kind of this idea that accessibility is hard or takes a tremendous amount of resources.

And I really just don't think that that's true. I think it can be true if you have certain setups, but moving towards more accessible solution also makes for a much more efficient, a much better solution for your marketing in general. It's like a if you want to stay in the stone ages of email marketing, you can stay there, or you can come to the future with us and have flexible messaging and make sure that they're accessible without a doubt.

So for those who are just learning about how rampant this is, what are the top three things folks can do to at least start the process that are easy and you name it. So the biggest one, absolute biggest is live text. Give me your live text. I have a couple of blog posts all about the importance of live text, and how it isn't just alt text that we need.

Second would be having alt text on your linked images. Do you do those two things? You will be better than most of the emails in my inbox. And then third, I would say, you know, attempting to pursue higher learning on it, or whether that's, you know, reading blog posts, reading through the EMC Accessibility report, you know, kind of familiarizing yourself with that.

So those two things, quick hits, get it done and then kind of continuing to progress that knowledge so that you're not just doing those two things. I love that because it's those are not hard things to do. And you don't have to be an email developer to do them either. I know in my the accessibility audits that I do at Stitch, I literally always have live text and images image alt text for linked images in my presentation.

Just baked in like it never leaves. It never goes anywhere. It's always a problem, without a doubt. Okay, I want to talk about a bad offender that you've mentioned during Covid when you received a letter from a CEO and it was entirely an image. Did you email them to tell them that it was how broken it was? No, I didn't, in part because any of us were sending out all of those billions of emails in March and April of 2020.

No, that there was no free time. Uh, like, I think I saw that email while I was drifting off to sleep, because I also had kids who were home doing home school all of a sudden dealing with their own consequences. So no, I definitely did not reach out. I just blasted blasted them on the internet instead. You've told a story about inventing a drawing device for people without hands when you were 11.

What is the adult equivalent of that misguided solution? You see companies proposing today such an adorable concept. For those that don't know, I entered this this project into the science fair for fifth grade, and the judge, kind of very snobby, pointed out that my drawing device had handles, and it was for people without hands.

You can kind of see the the very horrible, logical, logical fallacy of my ten year old self. But it happens a lot, especially in the technology sphere and especially in the accessibility space. When we're talking about accessibility overlays, they are sold all over the place. You can't Google accessibility or accessible websites and not get a million ads for these overlay companies.

But accessibility professionals have pointed out over and over and over again that these absolutely do not work. They cause more problems than they solve, but they're still selling them and they're still there. And there's a whole bunch of kind of I think people just I think especially now that we have all the AI stuff coming in.

People come up with an idea and they think it's great and they think it solves a problem, but they don't do any of the research to actually determine what the problem is, even just whether or not the problem has already been resolved. Without a doubt. You mean buying a new technology to build on top of my existing technology doesn't fix all my problems?

Who would have thought? Yeah, I can understand the appeal. It feels so much easier, so much cheaper. But in reality, the best thing you can do is to build something to be accessible from the beginning, not the over the top. Well, I think to that point, we've in the past ten, 15 years are like mobile first, mobile first in terms of how we're building things.

It also needs to be mobile first and accessible first, and then we'll have the same rigor. Yeah, I mean mobile first is part of Accessible First because when you're building something to be mobile first, you're thinking about live text. You're thinking about how that text is flowing in different sized screens and all of the things that I want you to think about when you're thinking about accessibility.

So they're very hand-in-hand. So yeah, totally agree for sure. Okay. You've said email marketing has literally saved your butt a few times as a newly single parent during the recession. How did financial Necessity shape your perspective on who deserves access to digital communications? Well, man, I think because that time was it was such a hard time for me and trying to get a leg up anywhere was such a complicated situation for me.

So I think one of the things that I have worked really hard on, of just from my own perspective, is trying to make sure that that information is freely available. You know, I learned a lot in my kind of early years from blogs that existed at the time, like Nicole Merlin's blog and literally Mark Robins and Jay.

Like, we're all kind of posting stuff and talking about how they were solving problems. And, you know, that was a lifeline for me, being a sole email developer in the dungeon basement of odd office buildings that I was working at in my early days. And I think it's so important that we, as kind of more experienced marketers, are kind of sharing those stories, sharing those kind of skills and knowledge that we have as best as we can.

But I think that there's still like, you know, generally if someone's reaching out to me and asking me to help solve a problem, I want to be able to do that. Yeah. I think, um, a lot of like, apprenticeship and mentorship has been lost. Yeah. And you don't know what you don't know. And it's also sometimes helpful to hear from someone who has been through it and understands what you're facing.

Um, not as a leg up, but just as a guiding light. And no, it's hard to find. And I think having someone who can look at it, you know, just even look at your code and say, oh, you have you're missing a closing tag. Like, just to give that little bit of, like, direction on what the problem is to be able to find it is is so huge.

So. Yeah. Totally agree. Okay. You've worked across all of the major platforms for enterprise marketing teams, sophisticated, particularly expensive platforms. Why is accessibility not a core feature of those platforms rather than just an add on service something you have to do on your own? Man, it's so hard because it's like, I think it speaks so much to the history of our own industry, right?

A lot of these ESPs were built in the very beginning of our industry, and were built a certain way and built by people who built emails a certain way, and in order to kind of build into that. Right. And so I think there's kind of a lot of archaic legacy code solutions that exist within those platforms, right?

And then I think we have a lot of these newer platforms that I think are at least trying. Like the the B3 editor really does a lot of good things, and that's a lot of what is in Bray's as well, is there? There are good solutions there. But now we have some pretty substantial gaps between what they're still not doing right and being able to advocate for their users, how to create accessible content within their platform that I think just doesn't exist yet.

So I do think there's kind of just a lot of missing pieces that hopefully we can continue to shore up and make better and kind of call out when it's not there for sure. And for what it's worth. B3 is the white labeled Wysiwyg builder for most major platforms, not all, but a significant portion that you wouldn't always expect.

I love the B3 team and I know they're aware of these things. And so yeah, I do think it's great that they're actively working on trying to solve some of this. I think that's great. Yes, they're actively working on it, but also they're directly listening to the power users. The folks who know and you know. Credit should go where credit is due of at least listening, because there's a lot of platforms that it just goes into a void and you never get heard from again.

As someone who has worked really hard to try to get in front of some of the, like, uh, builders of some of these platforms to be like, hey, we could just make this really accessible if we solve this problem. And getting anyone to listen to you is so nearly impossible sometimes. So absolute good to them. Agreed.

Yes. But it's also crazy because these companies are actively losing money, not just the platforms themselves, but also the brands that are leveraging these platforms by ignoring their disabled customers. And so like basic fixes, alt text for images like, why does that still require a specialist to implement?

Like I can see where this actually is a good job for AI to be like, all right, what text is in this image or describe this image. And so I don't know. That's where my head goes at least not to be super nitpicky, but alt text really isn't an image description. It's a little different, but fair. There is like there's a lot of nuance there, and I think there is also a lot of fear and anxiety about what it should be that I think keeps people from doing it just kind of silly in a number of ways, because anything is better than nothing.

But I think that a lot of times that kind of fear of doing it wrong, especially when we're talking about accessibility, is, is kind of overwhelming. And a lot of times people just want a source of truth to know that they're doing it right. It's hard to spend the time to learn how to do it right. And I know in my years of building and developing emails, my attempt was always all right.

If there are words, just write those words a bare minimum. It's I wouldn't say it's ideal, but it is a bare minimum. but like their minimum, is still more than a lot of people are doing. Which is true why we keep talking about it and why it's not done. Yeah. And I guess actually to that point, if I'm doing the bare minimum of putting what could be live text that's from my image, it's supportive of the email.

What could I do to be a step above that? Well, always same live text first. Um, but and I do think 1 to 1 is a good point. If you have text on your image, that text should be represented in the alt text as best as possible. I always want to be aware of the length of that text, because most screen readers will stop reading at about 120 characters.

So if you have a large block of text, that's not going to be read right, and there's a couple of different ways to solve it. I think the kind of most efficient way would be in your alt text to kind of reword it so that you're saying the most important step in the beginning, uh, so that that is what is actionable and understood by the user.

But I'll always continue to underline, but it's best. It's just lab tests. It can be. Yeah. So you mean I shouldn't have my really pretty testimonial written all there? Instead, I should actually have it as live text.

00:18:53 — 00:21:14

Really good. Makes it so much easier for so many people. Without a doubt. Okay. I want to continue talking about the tech and getting into the technical reality of what you're actually building. And so the gap between advocacy and execution. So where and how does AI provide easy shortcuts to improving accessibility and where does it fail and flail?

I mean, there are so many things that AI does well and that I think it's continuing to do well. Absolutely. Uploading an image to have it write the text for you if someone's not providing alt text is a good solution. But I'm always wary of people using AI to determine if a message is accessible, because I think there is just a there is a real lack of what is programmatically available to us.

When an AI or an accessibility checker can actually check versus something that a human can check, and those numbers put it at around 20 to 40% of the wcaG criteria, which means that anywhere from 60 to 80% of what you're seeing can't be quantified within a checker or AI. So so even if you get that 100% Dream Parcel accessibility score, you could still have a message that is not accessible and vice versa.

Even though I love the parcel guides, they do such a great job. But there is just a technical limit that AI and programmatic solutions just can't solve. That makes sense. Oh, I can't like it literally can't be done by a robot or a non-human. There has to be a certain amount of humans looking at things and making sure that it works correctly, without a doubt.

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00:21:16 — 00:30:29

And now back to the hot seat. Okay, you getting even more technical. You've documented how VML, which is Vector Markup Language, the coding language behind visual email elements such as background images and buttons can cause major accessibility failures and screen readers. And outlook 360 always outlook.

When you audit a client's existing templates, what percentage actually pass basic accessibility standards with that. There are definitely clients that don't use it. There's a bit of a confirmation bias there, because it is a group of people that are seeking out my services. So therefore they at least know to a certain extent that they need them.

But also, I don't think that there's such thing as 100% accessible. I just don't think that that's a good goal to have. I think focusing on the things that you can do to make it more accessible is always going to be the goal for me, and that's kind of the outcome of like one of my accessibility audits is, hey, here are the things that I'm seeing.

Here are some ways where I've seen that process. Not like fall apart. Like how can we shore up, you know, your alt text on your linked images so that people are getting the best possible experience? And if we can't do the best possible experience, what can we do that's, you know, a second best. And so my goal is never to get someone to 100%.

It's to get them as close to 100% as they can go and kind of hopefully lay out a plan for here's some things we can solve right now. Here are some things we can work on. Our process and our kind of organizational structure to get us to here. And then, you know, here's here's our goal for 2 to 3 years out. Yeah. So it kind of sounds like a pass fail.

Like you can pass really well or you can pass just barely. But as long as you're passing, we're in a better place. Well, I just always think it's a progress, not perfection kind of thing. Like. Yeah, I think, you know, if I take a retail client, like one that I'm auditing right now, that is image only. Uh, they have loads of images that are linked that have no alt tags.

Oh, fun. You know, even their footer, their footer links are all images without appropriate alt text. It's really bad. So am I going to take them from that to a fully flexible live text everywhere? Uh, email? Probably not. Like, I think that that would be a wonderful goal to have, but I don't think I'm going to get there.

I think I can get them to a place where, you know, maybe we're able to move some of that to live text, and maybe we're able to get them to actively pursue alt text that is more appropriate than nothing. You know, these are all kind of incremental goals versus, yeah, like a step change every time. Yeah, exactly.

Like as long as we're getting better. And I love that for our industry too. And I do think it is getting better. But it is a slow progress step. Yeah I will say I know an anecdote of a company I deeply respect who is actually in retail, and they hired a email designer who is also an email developer, and essentially created a design system that they use as their source of truth and core, and that is accessible in all the things, but they take it to another level if they do use AI to help build their emails, but it has to QA up against the email design system so that it's their own customized version.

I think there's been a lot of slack in our industry about AI, and I think people are kind of going at it from the wrong angle. I put this graphic into, uh, you know, ChatGPT or Claude and asked it to spit out an email and it spit spat out trash code. And it's like, well, yeah, of course it did. But what are some ways where we can work within AI?

Use it as a component, use it as a tool where we're having the AI be the kind of repository of all of these modules, and being able to build it from that side, instead of expecting the AI to do all of the lifting, how can we kind of incrementally work and work AI into our process? I think has been well, I hope has been everyone's kind of movement over the last few years because I think that's what we're all doing.

But yeah, that makes sense. And kind of in that same thing with automated campaign QA that you do, how much of that QA includes accessibility testing and what happens when accessibility requirements conflict with speed. Always if you do it right. Accessibility shouldn't take more time is my kind of core belief.

As a developer, I always try to make sure that the accessibility components, especially the on fire ones, are called out to clients. And so I will kind of call that out as soon as I see it, especially when it's the big ones, like not having alt text on linked images, color, contrast, you know, the kind of big, obvious, easy, fixable ones.

And then I always try to also have a follow up conversation because like, I think in the heat of the moment, you know, if this email was supposed to go out three hours ago and they keep having problems, uh, that's not the time for me to be like, let me talk to you. About 28% of our society. It's going to fall on deaf ears in that moment.

But I think, you know, being able to say, hey, I'm going to revisit an issue we have last week and kind of reflect more on calling out. I know that color contrast because of your branding, uh, system doesn't work here, but I really want us to kind of dig into that a little bit more and see what we can do, you know.

How is your website handling this problem? And kind of bring in some more of those tools to be able to have that conversation in a more open way than in the heat of the moment, because that's never a good time. Makes sense. And following that same vein, you were the lead email developer at Oracle. Did scale make accessibility easier or harder to implement consistently?

Oh god, I, I love this question because it's one of those things where the answer is yes, because, look, both of these things are true. Right. I think in a lot of ways, if I was a, you know, single developer for a specific company and I managed all of their emails, you know, I could more strictly maintain and manage accessibility from start to finish, right?

In bigger agencies, I think there is a bit of a problem of and I love developers. I love all of us. We're incredibly smart people, but there's also a lot of misinformation out there about accessibility that impacts developers, too. Like just even silly things. Like I heard a couple years ago, someone mentioned that our clickable links, our CTAs should have the little button on them, an area rule which is not true at all because a link is not a button.

A really big deal. So it's coming across. Being able to kind of manage what everyone is doing, to make sure that everyone is doing things that are actually accessible and not something that they just saw on a blog somewhere and do any testing on and just started firing into their systems, definitely is a lot harder to manage.

I think there's kind of just a lot of entropy that happens within systems that is hard to stay on top of. But on the flip side, I think because of my certifications and because of the research and the kind of work that I've done in our community, I do feel a certain amount of, I don't know, feeling heard when I say things that I feel like people do listen to that.

And so there's a certain amount of responsibility that kind of comes with that of being able to like, no, we're not going to do it that way. And this is why. And so you need to change it. And being able to kind of have the backing from upper leadership of kind of being like, yeah, I said, we're not doing this. It makes sense.

Um, and I guess for those who are wanting to learn more besides just your blog, where are reliable, trusted resources so that we can at least be going to the right places to learn more? No, I mean, there are so many smart people talking in our space right now. I mean, I gotta absolutely say, Paul, Ari, he's like the OG accessibility guy in our space and he is so smart, has such a wealth of knowledge and skill.

Um, that, like, I love his newsletter. It's amazing. Um, Mark Robins is another one. Obviously has worked with EMC and just from the very beginning I think is so important. And a lot of the work that he does is just so spot on, really kind of seeing all the problems from multiple different angles, I think is super important as well.

So those would be like my top two. But there is a lot of information just externally in the web space too, that I think is applicable. But you definitely have to kind of do some additional work to make sure that it works, because a lot of the stuff that works in web doesn't work in the email. Surprise. I kind of tell how it works.

Yes. Okay. I want to have us take a step back and and think through how our industry is drowning in good intentions and terrible execution. Um, it's so sad. So let's talk about the real state of things. There's some caveats that I'm sure you're going to include, but only 0.1% of HTML emails currently are meeting accessibility standards.

That's abysmal. And that means making your emails accessible immediately puts you ahead of 99.9% of competition. That's a pretty hefty stat. So yet here we are.

00:30:31 — 00:52:00

Um, what's the worst accessibility myth you've had to debunk in a corporate boardroom? Alt text isn't all you need. But I would say that is kind of our biggest myth that I keep running into where, you know, I'll say, well, your emails aren't accessible because they're all images, right? Well, we have alt text.

Okay, great. About 3% of the total population is visually impaired, and about half of those people use screen readers. So when we're talking about 28% of adults in the US that have a disability, we are not only talking about screen reader users, we are talking about the other, you know, 25% of those people who need other things like dyslexia.

Right. My youngest daughter has dyslexia, and she uses a lot of plugins on her browsers to be able to help her read the content that'll change the fonts or the colors or the font size so that she can more clearly read it right. None of those solutions work when your email is an image. So I really think that that's one of the biggest myths that I would love to just kibosh is like, if I could live through accessibility audits and not have someone say, but we have alt text, I would feel like I'm just like entered like a new a new realm of the world.

It just would be great. That makes sense. And I guess to that end. Are there particular fonts? Because email is persnickety as to which fonts will work, where and how? Yes. Is there a particular font or couple of fonts that we actually should focus on so that we can be that next level beyond alt text? Absolutely.

So I think there's some debate in the accessibility community around whether sans serif or serifs are better for reading. I think when we're talking about digital content, we usually point more towards sans serif, like a good clean sans serif is a good one. But I would also like to have email developers Specifically.

Actually take a step back from font choices and actually allow us, well, have us code messages where the user can select the font. So that actually means not having inline font styles or kind of being more flexible about those inline font styles, because a lot of those plugins can override at, you know, top levels, but can't always override those inline styles.

So allowing for a little less rendering strictness and a little bit more rendering flexibility so that users can change the fonts to what works for them would be my biggest suggestion. Yeah, that's a big one that I have yet to come across. So in that respect, would the font be based off of an extension that's adjusting it for someone's browser, or is that something you preset of, like, I just want all of my content in my inbox to be using this font, or is it either or.

Well so it's a little bit of both. So I think us as developers making sure that we're kind of setting the font more in the internal style sheet and less. You know, like I was saying, not so much on the inline style. And that in itself allows these plugins to come in and make some of those changes. Um, so a lot of the like the dyslexic font plugin that you can put on any of your browsers will automatically change all of the text on a page to a dyslexia friendly font.

But if you have your font styled inline, it doesn't. It's not always able to overcome that. Quite honestly, they're getting better than when I first tested it a couple of years ago. We're not stagnant here. There's definitely like some nuance to that in that, you know, obviously brands want to have their brand font and have that be available.

But if a user has decided to choose something different, whether that be a plug in or changing their font preference within the email client itself or even just globally, then their UI, you know, making sure that we can kind of meet that as best as we can, given the limitations of our media is is what I like to say, like, as best as we can.

Understood. And if you could have a magic wand and change one thing across all email platforms tomorrow, what would it be? Prefers reduce motion. That would be my my big one, in part because I love a good animated GIF like I am a true like elder millennial. I love me some animated gifs. They make me very happy too, and especially in email, because we have so many limits on what we actually can do.

An animated GIF does so much by, you know, providing energy and motion. But as email marketers, we don't have the ability to control that the way that we do on websites. Um, so what I mean by that is if I'm just on Firefox or Chrome, um, I can actually change a setting in that browser that says, I don't want my animated GIFs like that, you know, makes me feel sick or, you know, as someone with ADHD, I can't focus on the text because of the moving animation.

So I want that animation to not play. That's something that we can do in a browser, but within an email client, we really don't have that control everywhere. And so that gets us to what is essentially a fallback solution in the wcaG of only having animated GIFs that play for five seconds, which is nothing, right?

Like makes my heart sad. I'm like, but an animated GIF should be fun and keep going. Um, and especially a five second animated GIF that isn't taking up the majority of the screen. So when we're following all of the what what kind of criteria? Like generally we even want it below the fold. Five seconds later, that GIF isn't even playing by the time I get to it.

Right. So we have all these kind of fallback limitations because we don't have the ability to control those animated GIFs using that preferred reduce motion. We really have to rely on this extended fallback of not having the GIFs play for five seconds, and that is such a limit to us as marketers that can totally be resolved.

And so I think that would be that's on my wish list. That'd be awesome. And for what it's worth, I feel like the most impactful gifts are not large. They're small little accouterments. They're more like not to go too far here, but do it. Um, so prefers reduced motion. The wcaG criteria of pause stop, hide.

Being able to pause stock or hide animations is actually in one of the top four most important vocab criteria that we can meet. That even if nothing else in your email is accessible, you have to meet these requirements, right? It's a really, really, really big deal and you can't meet it. And so like I think when I talk about animated GIFs, people are like, oh, silly, literally animated GIFs.

It's no thing. This is actually a really, really, really big deal. And the people that are impacted by automatically looping animated GIFs are severely impacted by them. So even though in the world that we live in, it feels like a very small thing, it's actually a really big deal, which is why I want why it's at the top of my list instead of, you know, making everyone do live text or something.

That makes a lot of sense. And so for many marketers, a lot of what they are evaluating is like the worthwhile the worthiness of making certain changes, particularly based on email client usage. And they see the breakdown, and oftentimes they're apparently willing to break access for so many folks, whether it's rounded corners and just all the outlook things.

How do you have a conversation with folks about improving accessibility without completely losing them and keeping their interest? They do try to really focus. Like even when I'm doing my audits, I try to stick with the focus in the very beginning on the biggest offenders. And what's nice about the biggest offenders is that I can usually show instead of tell.

Right. So if you have an image based email and your linked images don't have alt text. I can play a recording of that screen reader read out and you can. Your jaw will drop. You know what I mean? So this is an easy way for me to kind of say, wow, this is a good problem. A couple of weeks ago, I actually had a client who was using animated GIFs that were looping endlessly, and they were very vibrant.

So after making sure that everyone in the room was not going to have a reaction to this, I made a slide full of all of their animated GIFs just playing out a loop so that I'm not going to stay on the slide for long. But I want you to know what it feels like when people see these animated GIFs on your screen. If you're impacted by it, it is a very jarring experience.

And so I do try to make it as relevant as possible and kind of put people into that experience. It was very common to bring a dyslexia experience kind of game that we would start out, you know, showing the teachers. You know now. Right. Everything with your left hand. Like how much more are you thinking about it?

Or even we had a game where, um, we would, you know, do the story continuation where one person starts a story and someone else finishes it. But then you can no longer use the letter N, so the letter N can't be in any of your words, and how much more you have to think about words and the construction of words to be able to go through that process, I think, is part of what I carry with me into my audits to make sure that people aren't just like, yes, this is a checklist item.

We're not making it. This is how we need it. But like, this is why this is a checklist item. This is why this is important to your users. This is their experience when they're opening your absolutely beautiful email that they can't read. I think everyone, whether or not you experience it, having some version of experiencing it changes your perspective.

And while we've been harping on this, accessibility advocates have been making these cases for years. I mean, we already talked about $1.2 trillion of purchasing power left in the dust and 1 in 4 US adults live with a disability. So this, to me, the most clear ROI of what can be changed and what can be done.