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Re: E-mail

for

From: Cliff Tyllick
Date: Feb 16, 2013 10:45PM

Jukka (Yucca) Korpela wrote:


From the accessibility point of view, it is not essential
to have the sender's preferences on fonts imposed, for example. Rather,
accessibility is usually improved if text appears in the default font
face and size of the e-mail client, since this is what can be expected
to work for the reader (and can be tuned for him).

Cliff responds:

Jukka, I was discussing just this point with a colleague recently. We noted how the e-mail clients we are most familiar with (Outlook and Groupwise) do quite the opposite—in HTML format, e-mail is formatted as intended by the person who sent the e-mail. Unless we've missed something, it isn't possible to set up your preferences so incoming e-mail is displayed in the format you prefer. And, as you note, that is absolutely backwards from the standpoint of accessibility.

For example, in the situation we were dealing with, someone had sent an e-mail in light orange text against a completely white background. Neither of us could easily read the message, but the only way we could change the formatting was to hit "Reply (include message)" and modify the formatting in the draft message or, even faster, to copy the contents of the e-mail and drop them into a word-processing program or even a text editor.

All of which is wrong.

If the only color combination our author can see is light orange on white, then they should be allowed to use those colors as they draft the message. But if my friend and I need some other combination, we should be able to make that the default display on our computers.

So when will the people programming e-mail clients understand that?

Cliff