Write Accessible Emails

When writing emails, you never know who your audience is and whether they have a disability. Although you may not work with someone with an apparent disability, many disabilities are non-apparent, including Dyslexia, ADHD, and some forms of vision loss. Writing accessible emails matters for various disabilities so following Microsoft's best practices around accessible emails ensures you are developing an email inclusive to all your colleagues, regardless of if they have disclosed a disability or not. Here are five best practices to follow when creating emails:

1. Break up a long email with headings. Remember to use the built in headings in Outlook so they are rendered to screen reader users correctly. 
2. Avoid images of text. When developing an email, keep in mind that people with apparent and non-apparent disabilities need access to the text in your email. While you can put alt text behind an image, not everyone using assistive technology will be able to access that text. For example, someone with dyslexia that is using a text to speech software will not be able to access the alt text on an image. If you are going to add text to an image, keep it simple and include the same text in the body of the email. 
3. Provide alt text for images. When adding images to an email, include alt text, even when the image is being used to convey a specific tone only. When including images of people, remember to describe important aspects of the people in the image as best as possible (including their ethnicity when you are able to obtain that information). 
4. Write descriptive links. Do not include non-descriptive links such as click here and read more. Tell the user where the link will lead them - for example, Register to Attend would inform a reader they are going to access a registration form - which is much more informative than Click here or Read more. 
5. Use built-in lists for order and unordered lists. Do not manually create your own indented lists with dashes or other symbols. Using non-built in lists prevents listed content from being read correctly by assistive technology. 

You can access step-by-step instructions based on your devise (PC, Mac, iOS, Android, and Web) at Microsoft's Make your Outlook email accessible to people with disabilities.