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Re: E-mail

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: Feb 14, 2013 1:25PM

On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 12:32 PM, Chagnon | PubCom wrote:

> My off-the-top-of-my-head guidelines are:

A very good list. In general, I think it's best to keep things simple.
Remember that most e-mail clients (including Gmail) do not show images
by default. Only some of them will show alternative text instead of
images. So use images judiciously. Use appropriate headings. You can
use CSS to style them (or any other content). But remember that many
e-mail clients remove styling also, so be sure it works and looks OK
without them.

For our e-mail newsletters (http://webaim.org/newsletter) we give
users an option to subscribe to either the HTML or plain-text version.
When sending the HTML version, we (as Bevi suggested) also include the
text-only version as an alternative content component. The user's
e-mail client will present the HTML version if enable, otherwise it
has text-only content to fall back to.

We also do some basic formatting in the text-only version to make it a
bit more readable:

- Offset 'headings' by surrounding them with asterisks.
- Use "-- " (two dashes) at the beginning of what would otherwise be
lists to visually designate them.
- Use double line breaks between sections to visually separate them.
- Provide a link to the online HTML version so folks can read it
online if they choose.
- Provide an easy mechanism for the recipient to unsubscribe or manage
their subscription online.

Jared Smith
WebAIM.org