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Re: Poll: HTML Emails vs. Plain Text Emails

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From: JP Jamous
Date: Sep 20, 2017 9:03AM

Nick,

I personally like HTML e-mails as they have the links, bullets, numbers and other tabular information. However, some e-mails are way too large as far as content, which forces JAWS to take a long time to render the HTML. Those, I prefer them in plain text. If it is going to take my SR almost 2 minutes to respond to me, I am deleting that e-mail.

The other part of HTML e-mails is that they have to be composed properly. I use the Outlook client and it does strip the images out of the e-mail for security reasons. I am fine with that. As long as the link has some alternative text. I never tried it via code myself, but adding aria-label="Check Your Balance" would be better than the Alt attribute as the image would get blocked.

Plain text lacks a lot of that convenience and you want to provide your customers with that convenience. If my bank sends me a plain e-mail, I would not want to copy and paste each URL in it.