With marketers under pressure to do more with less, some have turned to no-code email builders as a way to cut costs. However, from an accessibility perspective, these platforms can carry substantial legal risks for email marketers that shouldn’t be overlooked.

What Are the Risks?

If a no-code email builder creates emails that aren’t accessible for consumers, it’s rarely the email builder that’s liable. It’s the sender. That’s because it is up to the brand that sends the emails to ensure the final product is accessible.

We’re seeing this same dynamic currently play out with WYSIWYG website builders. Platforms like Shopify and Squarespace are creating websites that are getting their users into accessibility lawsuits. And it’s not the platforms that are being named in the lawsuits.

While a lot of companies may think the responsibility lies with the service provider—since it’s their platform that’s coding the emails—that’s simply not the case. Even though they’re selling “accessible-friendly” themes and templates, that the brand is ultimately responsible is clarified in the legalese and disclaimers of their marketing, and then cemented in customer contracts, where you sign away the ability to sue them for your own non-conformance.

Moreover, the responsibility should rely with senders, since they make lots of design decisions that have accessibility implications. For instance, are you checking the contrast ratios of your text to ensure they’re legible? Are you making sure your alt text is appropriate? Are you writing clear calls-to-action that are specific (i.e., no “click here”)? Given all of those potential choices, it would be inappropriate for your email builder platform to be responsible.

So, there are ultimately two parts to making emails accessible when you’re using an email builder: 

  1. How accessible your email builder’s base code is
  2. What you put into the email builder

Let’s look at both of those components and how marketers can put up some guardrails to protect themselves.

What to Look for in a No-Code Email Builder

Here are five elements to look for in a no-code email builder if you want to ensure you’re creating accessible emails.

1. A Solid Codebase
A lot of accessibility in email boils down to code, and many of the code frameworks these tools are built on are pretty old. So, evaluating this code is where you should start. 

If you don’t have access to the codebase, send yourself a test email to your Litmus or Email on Acid account to pull the code that is sent from your service provider. Alternatively, you can usually follow the “view in browser” link and then pull the source code from the browser view. Once you’ve done that, here’s a checklist of things to look for:

  • The use of semantic text. Are there <p> tags and heading tags (<h1> – <h6>) surrounding text blocks? If so, that’s a great start.
  • The absence of VML. You can usually search for “v:” to determine if there are any VML components. You don’t want any VML in your email code. 
  • Fully clickable calls-to-action buttons. You want your CTA buttons to be fully clickable, which you can test by slowly moving your mouse cursor around the CTA. If the ends of the CTA button still show the pointer icon, you’ve got a fully clickable CTA. If you only get the pointer icon when hovering over the CTA text, then you do not have a fully clickable CTA.

Those items should be considered truly baseline. To ensure the code output is truly accessible, we recommend investing in an agency partner or email accessibility specialist to do a full audit. They can review the code base for you, helping steer you clear of non-accessible components within a system you’re evaluating and guide you toward a good platform decision.

Related post: 6 Signs You Need an Email Accessibility Audit

2. Strong Internal Controls or Code Control
If you’re able to find an email builder that demonstrates they are deeply invested in staying up to date with accessibility best practices, that’s great. However, remember that they don’t have the same stakes you do in the accessibility of the final product.

If you’re not able to find a no-code email builder that you’re completely comfortable with, then the best solution is for you to build and import your own accessible modules. While building your own accessible framework and training your team on how to maintain it increases your upfront costs, this is the safest path if your brand wants to avoid hiring a full-time developer.

3. Good Accessibility Documentation
The code control doesn’t matter if you don’t understand how to work with the code. For that, you want guides to the platform that describe where their control ends and where yours begins. 

This documentation should be both high level and detailed. If your new email hire needs to know how to write good alt text, do they have a document for that, which would supplement your own brand guidance on alt text? If you want fully accessible emails, is there documentation that details which vendor-supplied modules meet that criteria and which ones don’t?

4. Access to Accessibility Controls
To maximize accessibility, you have to have access to all of the elements that impact it. For example, you should have:

  • Access to the aIt attributes of all the images in an email
  • Control over the color contrast in some way—and it’s even better if your email builder alerts you of potential color-contrast failures 
  • Control over the heading level of your headings, which shouldn’t be automatically correlated to the font size of the heading text itself
  • The ability to turn “off” VML in background images and calls-to-action in your email modules

Related webinar: 6 Common Accessibility Myths that Cost Brands Customers

5. Ease of Content Editing
If you need to add a new paragraph, change the text color, replace an image, or update alt text, how easy is it to do that? If it’s difficult to make those changes, your team may not always follow your accessibility protocols, especially when they’re rushed.

Creating Accessible Content & Designs

Finding yourself a good no-code email builder is only the first part of creating accessible emails. The rest is determined by the copy and images you put into your no-code email builder, as well as your overall design. Here’s how you do your part to make sure the content you’re inputting is accessible.

1. Readability

Let’s start with the least technical, but among the most challenging: the words you use to communicate your message. The old marketing rule of writing at a third grade reading level applies here. Sometimes you have complicated things to discuss, but please try to simplify it as best you can. Small words, short sentences, and short paragraphs are generally the goal. While it’s fun to be clever, it’s more lucrative to be clear—especially when it comes to emails, which subscribers are typically skimming rather than reading.

Design-wise, you can make your copy more accessible by using generous font sizes, not centering text, using a legible font, having plenty of space between lines of text, and avoiding lines of text that are overly long. The key is to design with flexibility in mind – allowing users to adjust the text to suit them best.

Related checklist: Accessibility & Inclusive Design Ideas to Explore

2. Paragraph Tags
While it can be laborious to add a new paragraph and formatting to each paragraph, it’s important for creating accessible experiences. Adding a line break tag is insufficient.

3. Heading Levels
You’ll want to make sure your headings are appropriate—that is, they are related to the content underneath it, and they follow a logical hierarchy. If you do that, heading levels won’t always be associated with font size, so your email builder should have the ability to change the font size and the heading level, independently of each other.

4. Color Contrast

When the color of your text doesn’t contrast enough with the background color it’s on, the legibility of your text suffers. In fact, insufficient color contrast is a routine failure in accessibility audits, so managing this appropriately is a surefire way to make your content more accessible than your competitors’.

To check your color contrast ratio, drop your foreground and background colors into WebAIM’s Color Contrast checker. If the contrast isn’t strong enough, tweak your colors. Usually, that means changing your text color, which no-code email builders typically make easy, with a simple change of the hex color code.

Maintaining strong color contrasts is made significantly easier if your brand colors have been selected with this issue in mind.

5. Alt Text
First, determine if your images are linked, then follow W3 best practices for alt text. This is one of the most critical parts you can control in no-code solutions, so make sure your alt text is good!

6. Minimizing Graphical Text

Even with the availability of alt text, it’s highly recommended to minimize the amount of text that you embed in images. Using HTML text is superior in nearly every instance, and email font stacks can include a wide range of fonts, including custom fonts.

The introduction of AI Summaries by Apple, Google, and others has made HTML text even more valuable, since these engines ignore graphical text and alt text when ingesting content on which to base their summary.

Related post: Email Marketing Font Stacks: Defining Your Font-Family

7. Animated Gifs

Animated gifs can cause major accessibility problems. Specifically, looping and repeating gifs can have severe impacts on some subscribers, including those prone to seizures. Because of those risks, it’s recommended that brands stop animations after 5 seconds, and be careful with any flashing content, especially if it has high-contrast colors. 

Related post: Animated Gifs: Best Uses and Best Practices

With the guidelines above, marketers should be able to review existing no-code email builders to find a solution that meets their accessibility needs, while also fully recognizing their role in creating accessible content. As marketers, it’s up to us to find solutions that fit these criteria so we not only attract and engage the widest possible audience, but also avoid costly and damaging lawsuits.

(Disclaimer: While I am an expert in email accessibility, I’m not a lawyer and am not providing you with legal advice. In consultation with legal counsel, you and your company should determine the level of legal risk you are willing to assume with your accessibility decisions.)

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Need help with the accessibility of your email marketing campaigns? Oracle Digital Experience Agency has hundreds of marketing and communication experts ready to help Responsys, Eloqua, Unity, and other Oracle customers create stronger connections with their customers and employees—even if they’re not using an Oracle platform as the foundation of that experience. With a 94% satisfaction rate, our clients are thrilled with the award-winning work our creative, strategy, and other specialists do for them, giving us an outstanding NPS of 70.

For help overcoming your challenges or seizing your opportunities, talk to your Oracle account manager, visit us online, or email us at OracleAgency_US@Oracle.com.

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