Summer 2019 Tips: Email / MailChimp Accessiblity

When you use any kind of web service for college related communications, including external services like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, MailChimp, etc., you are required to follow campus communication standards and rules, including making your content accessibility compliant.

If you are not familiar with accessibility, there are some good resources, including an accessibility primer and a short online accessibility course, available on this website.

The issue I've noticed lately is the use of MailChimp to send out announcements that are nothing more than a scanned image of a printed flier.  While it is okay to include a scanned image of an event's flier, you must also type out all of the information into the body of the email itself, so that anyone who might use a screen reader can obtain that information.  This is because screen readers cannot extract text out of an image file.

This is especially important with MailChimp, as it does not present images correctly in emails, so to someone using a screen reader there is often not even an indication that the image is there.  Thus, to them it can look like you sent a blank email if you don't also type out the information contained in the scanned flyer image.