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"If I could live through accessibility audits and not have someone say, 'but we have alt text,' I would feel like I just entered a new realm of the world." — Sarah
Email accessibility (a11y) is broken, and the industry largely knows it.
77% of brands say accessibility is a priority. Only 8% follow best practices. Only 0.1% of HTML emails actually meet the standard. That's not a resource problem; it's a myth problem, a status quo problem, and in some cases, a willful ignorance problem.
The industry talks endlessly about inclusion while locking out 1.3 billion disabled people worldwide, who collectively control over $1 trillion in annual disposable income.
Sarah Gallardo has spent over 12 years building email campaigns for Fortune 500 companies, earning her CPACC and Trusted Tester certifications along the way. She now audits enterprise email programs for accessibility, and in this episode, she brings the receipts on an industry that talks inclusion and consistently fails to deliver.
Timestamps
00:42 — The 77% vs. 8% Chasm: The industry says accessibility matters. The data says otherwise, and the gap isn't malicious; it's a myth. Either way, disabled users pay for it.
07:15 — The $121 Billion Case: Inaccessible digital experiences cost an estimated $121 billion on Black Friday 2021 alone. The ROI argument isn't theoretical; it's already been paid for.
16:45 — Why the Big Platforms Are Still Behind: Legacy code, slow feedback loops, and architecture built before accessibility was a priority. Sarah explains why the tools millions of marketers use every day haven't caught up.
20:55 — AI Can't Audit This, Yet Don’t Chase 100%: 60–80% of WCAG criteria can't be evaluated by any automated checker. A perfect score from a tool isn't a finish line; it's barely a starting point.
26:44 — How Misinformation Survives at Scale: At large companies, bad accessibility advice spreads quietly through dev teams. Only certifications, reputation, and leadership backing earn advocates enough authority to push back.
31:00 — The Alt Text Myth That Won't Die: Alt text isn't the finish line marketers think it is. 25% of disabled users aren't using screen readers at all, including people with dyslexia, relying on tools that block images outright.
38:55 — The Moment Stakeholders Stop Arguing: Nothing converts a skeptic faster than hearing a screen reader try to read a broken email out loud. Sarah's go-to move in the room.
43:30 — Audits for Lawyers vs. Audits for People: Some companies run accessibility audits to build a legal paper trail, not to fix anything. Sarah's real job is turning that defensive instinct into actual change.
49:30 — The Misinformation Loop Nobody Talks About: Bad accessibility advice gets copy-pasted across the industry until it's baked into real codebases, quietly undermining the very users it claims to help.
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Creators and Guests
What is Making Sense of Martech?
Unfiltered takes on the biggest shifts in marketing technology. We spotlight what matters, who's leading (or lagging), and what's next. In Martech, clarity is power — and we're here to deliver it.
Welcome to the making sense of martech. I'm Jacqueline Friedman. 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. 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. 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. Nobody likes it when I
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touch. 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. 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. Why has
this pressure not moved the needle? I don't know, I think in my young, idyllic new accessibility. Sarah,
I really thought it was an information problem. And I do think there's a certain amount of
information that needs to be met there. But I think that there's a status quo problem in email
that I think a lot of us are kind of working to push back against a lot of the conferences and
kind of webinars that I've talked to a lot lately have been really talking about, kind of pushing us
past what we've always done or what's worked in the past. You know, we live in such a completely
different world now than the one we were living in five years ago or ten years ago. We can't use
the same metrics. So I do think that there's kind of a core misunderstanding and kind of and also
a desire to not change anything because there is so much pressure right now. So those are my my big
thoughts. I'm always happy to see that there is a a tide of change happening in our
industry within the accessibility space, where I think people are really paying attention. I know
I've talked about before how much I love the EMC Accessibility Report, and I think that's really
one of the bigger, like big signs in the ground that say, hey, this is this is what needs to change
and this is how we're changing it. And I think that that is so important, but it's not enough.
Build off of that. Do you think perhaps actually there's a lot of just lack of enforcement and
that's a huge problem. Yes. I have been asked before. Well, when was email marketing in
any of these accessibility lawsuits? And the truth is it's there, but it's always there as a writer
in a more, bigger part of the lawsuits. Right. Um, that I was kind of thrilled to see, I
think was the Domino's lawsuit actually had an email in there as being a problem. But I don't
think we're going to have a lawsuit that's just focused on email marketing. Um, now, for some time,
like I, I do think that something that kind of cohesively as we kind of build up
these standards, it will be easier to draw out and find the bad players within our
industry, for sure. It's just so fascinating to me because essentially everything to do with
accessibility or lack thereof, it just makes your disabled users invisible. And I
never become the priority. And I'm curious from your perspective as you're consulting clients,
like is the actual answer hiring a specialist to run that audit and fix the template? Or
sometimes it's just allowing them to skate by the status quo. I do think that there's a certain
amount of defensive auditing that companies can do where, you know, if I'm presented with or,
you know, if I if I'm a company and I'm getting sued for accessibility and I can pull open my
drawer and say, I've had these audits done and we're good, or, you know, at least being able to
show we have been working on this, this is how we'd solve that problem, I think makes that
lawsuit a little bit more defensible. And that definitely exists. I don't think it's a good
solution, but I do think, I mean, at least for me personally in the audits that I'm done. The end
result is usually clients who have changed their mind about what they thought accessibility was at
the beginning of the call, and clients that are excited about trying to meet meet those failures
and work towards solutions. I do think that there like in all things, I think there is just a
certain level of entropy that happens when you're doing something at scale. And I definitely one of
the things that I do suggest to audit clients is like, okay, so, you know, we have this plan, let's do
let's bake in some check ins at three months, at six months, so that we can kind of make sure that
we're plugging in any of the holes where things are falling off. And then I'm looking at those
Black Friday middle of the night edits, you know, where the alt text isn't updated. And we can be
like, okay, well, here's the problem. How can we build in a solution and solve it? Is the clients
that are running things through accessibility checkers and feeling like they've got a green
flag and so they never have to think about it again, right? Even though I'm forever pointing out,
like, that's not everything, you still need a human. So there's always going to be, I think, a natural,
inherent conflict within the auditing process. And I do my best to kind of pre resolve that and kind
of work to make sure that that's not just something that's in our drawers so that we can
prove that we tried, you know. Yeah. Kind of reminds me of all the different, um, force trainings. And
when you're on board at any sort, certain company like. Well, we checked the box. We did it. Um,
everyone was informed of X, Y, and Z, and it feels like an excuse
and really, like, let's cover our tracks so that we're fine, but instead it's actually the
individual that's the problem. Which, yeah, oftentimes it can be. However, it's also systemic
that we're blaming an individual versus the broader company. Yeah, exactly. And I think that's
kind of a lot of what I, I do try to kind of get us back to like it isn't a lot of what I say in
my audits is like, it's not one person's job to do accessibility when we're going through these
audits. I'm not just talking to a developer. I want to talk to everyone on the team, because if the
design gets to the developer and no one's check the color contrast, that's not the developer's
fault, you know, and kind of making sure that this is on everyone problem, not a the guy at the end
of the road problem for sure. It almost sounds like we need to have dedicated email guides for
accessibility on top of what exists for web because is a different medium. We are a little bit
stuck in the 90s versus what web can do. And to your point earlier, we actually can't
even fully abide by the rules in email based off of how the technology exists today.
Yes and no. But I do like that has actually been a lot of my push lately. Um, stitches actually
creating some of this documentation so that we can send to clients kind of as parting gifts with
an audit, you know, even if they don't do like a full big audit of being able to say, hey, notice
that your heading order isn't quite right. So here is a PDF on, you know, the best way to do that in
grace and kind of what success looks like so that they can at least have a guide. I really think
most ISPs should have really good documentation about how to make their content accessible,
especially when we're talking about some of these drag and drop editors that everybody's using, but
nobody really knows how to use. There's was definitely gaps there that we can fill whether or
not anyone ever looks at those documents. Completely different problem, but like having it
available to people I think would be huge, without a doubt to begin to close this out. What's the
hardest thing about this moment in email accessibility that you don't often say out loud? I
kind of hate saying it out loud, actually, is that there's a lot of misinformation out there. There's
a lot of recycled content where like, I totally get it. And especially since it's as accessibility
continues to build momentum in our industry, I think there's a lot of pressure from individual
companies and organizations within our industry to produce accessibility content. And so I think a
lot of stuff just keeps getting recycled. And like I did it, too. I championed Bulletproof Buttons as
an accessible solution in like my very first accessibility dot. And that was totally wrong
because I didn't do the work to find out if that was right or not. So I think there is just kind of
a lot of stuff that gets regurgitated without anyone thinking about it. And that has
consequences. And I think the natural consequence is that enough people listen to it and then they
implement it in their solutions, and then it doesn't really actually work and causes a lot of
dumb problems for users. Agreed. That's why I'm bringing on the experts, because I'm sick of the
misinformation and even and the false myths that we all deem true. And
I know a fair amount about accessibility, but it's saying for me, with deliverability, I know when it
requires a professional versus I'm well versed but not the expert. Exactly. We all have to have
understanding and limits. We can't. No one can be the jack of all trades in email and marketing
anymore. It just can't happen. You can't know everything. So it's true. Completely agree. Okay,
Sarah, you are proof that most powerful advocates are those who combine deep technical knowledge
with a personal stake in the outcome, and the accessibility revolution will not come from just
compliance departments. It'll come from the people who refuse to accept that 27% of customers are an
optional audience and segment. And so before I let you go, who is someone we should have on the
podcast? Oh my gosh. And there's so many, so many good ones. There's two women that I know I
personally have counted on for for their deep, expansive knowledge and just historical
understanding of our industry. And that would be Karina Cohen and Jenna mattson. They are
like Salesforce deep divers. Like they just know everything. That's awesome. Okay. Well, thank you so
much. Where can folks find you? Well, you can always find me on LinkedIn. And then also my blog, which
is a11y email, which has all things email accessibility on it. So thank you. Awesome.
We have covered a lot of ground today. And the uncomfortable truth is most of this is fixable.
Here is where to start with some listener takeaways. Number one, only 0.1% of HTML emails
meet accessibility standards, which means having accessibility baked into your process. Your RDF
99.9% of the competition. Instantly, 28% of US adults have a disability, which means
you're not just designing for a niche, you're ignoring your largest untapped segment. So start
with live text and alt text on linked images. Those are just two very quick fixes without a
specialist required, and it is better than most inboxes overnight. But if you want to take it to
that next level, I highly recommend thinking through contrast and potentially even getting an
accessibility audit. Next, AI can only check 20 to 40% of wcaG
criteria, which means a green accessibility score doesn't mean your email is accessible. It means a
robot checked what a robot can check. The remaining requires a human to review 60 to 80%.
And also that means the automated score is a flaw, not a finish line. So build human auditing into
the design stage before the email ever reaches your developer. And lastly, accessibility is not
one person's job. And that means if color contrasts fail in production, that's a process
failure, not a developer failure. Most ESPs don't document how to build accessibility into their
platforms, which means the knowledge gap is systemic and it's not singular to an individual.
So audit your process aggressively as you build your templates. Where does your accessibility get
checked? By whom and at what stage? Thank you for tuning in to the making sense of MarTech. See you
next time. A special thank you to Christine Murtaugh, who edited this episode. In an extra
special thank you to Jenna Carter for believing in a passion project meets business. Stay curious.