We all know that emails are notoriously difficult to build across the vast swath of email clients, and you might think that there’s nothing you could do about making them as accessible as possible.
But you’d be wrong.
Let’s take this example from the most profitable company in the world: Apple.
When design hinders accessibility
Straight away we can visually see a number of accessibility issues.
- Colour contrasting. You can almost see why Apple have designed their ‘small print’ this way. They don’t feel that it’s important to the message contained in the email, so they’ve made it as invisible as they can, but this is wrong. Not all visually impaired users are blind. Most of them won’t even use a screen reader such as Jaws to have a site read to them; this is the last possible option for most people trying to retain their independence. Unfortunately Apple have chosen grey on grey – a VERY difficult colour combination for anyone to read, let alone those who have trouble distinguishing multiple shades of one colour for fine details.
- Size. Now, we all know this is ‘small print’, but why does small print exist on the web? The old ideas of limited print space and “Let’s make this as small as we can so nobody reads it” are long since past. The web contains as much space as you want, and the public are more appreciative of legal and privacy information than ever before. This size will only impede those who want to read it, and unfortunately that again will affect your visually impaired readers.
- Links. Apple have made the classic mistake with their links, a mistake which is so old it’s actually quite shocking that they have done this. ‘Click here’. Why? What does it mean? You might be forgiven for thinking that the surrounding text might explain why you want to ‘Click Here’, but what about your users using a screen reader? Many feature a mode to simply read out links so that a user can quickly navigate your site. To a screen reader, using the image above, this would sound as follows: “www.apple.com/uk/studentoffer”, “Click here”, “Click here”, “Click here”, “Click here”, “Click here”, “All Rights Reserved”, “Privacy Policy”, “My Apple ID”, “Click here”.
You probably aren’t in charge of an email department quite as large as Apple’s, but if you avoid these obvious mistakes then you can be sure that yours will be better.
One of the things the new iPhone 3GS has is an internal geographic compass. This is achieved with a device known as a magnetometer – something which can give you a 3-dimensional X, Y, Z co-ordinate to the magnetic north pole. The great (and sometimes frustrating thing) about these devices is, that they’re influenced by nearby metallic object, albeit, not by much. Still, this ‘negative’ effect is one we wanted to exploit, and turn into the first visual metal detector app for the new iPhone.
During tests I noticed that metals which tend to be more influenced by magnets were also the items most easily detected – Iron was found easily, but Aluminium barely registered. One of the other things I discovered was the influence of magnets on the 3GS – the stronger the magnetic flux, the higher the influence on the 3D geometrics. After this discovery, and our current lack of icon for the project I had an epiphany and said “Flux. This thing measures Magnetic flux too. How about a flux capacitor?”. Anyone who loves Back to the Future will know what that is! This remains my most significant contribution to the project.
After we’d finished producing the app and start of the site, we went to record the video in my dining room, with my Panasonic Lumix (The resolution on that thing isn’t too bad for a video). The final cut of this video features me swearing (sorry about that) and the sound of the doorbell, as a nice man delivers our Indian curry. Mmm.