Name: Accessibility in email and the EAA
Uploaded: 2025-06-03T15:16:04.648Z
Duration: 1 h 1 min 4 s
Description: Accessibility in email and the EAA

Transcript for "Accessibility in email and the EAA": Good morning. Good evening. Good afternoon. My name is Thomas Tiberkineh, and you are watching another Sinch Mailgun and Sinch Mailjet webinar. Got some amazing guests here today, and you know them, everyone, ladies and gentlemen. Let's see here. Oh, first and foremost, what are we talking about today? We're talking about the accessibility in email and the EAA. What is the EAA? That is the European Accessibility Act That's coming live very soon. We'll talk about that date coming up. Let's see here. But I got some amazing people I wanna talk about. First and foremost, it's kinda like the Brady Bunch in here. I'm trying to figure out where everyone is. We got people from the left to the right all over the place. Let's start down the line, shall we? First and foremost, Natalie Hayes, the senior product marketing manager for Mailgun. Natalie, how are you doing this morning? I'm doing pretty good. It's bright and early here in San Antonio, Texas, but it is nice and cool. It hasn't gotten super hot yet, so I'll take it. You know? I'll take it. Okay. We had we had a big chunk of rain come through last week, and we're we're still riding that vibe right now. So we're pretty happy about that, aren't we? Yeah. Yeah. Big rush. So Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. We we yeah. We need it. We need it. And moving down the line here, we're gonna head up to the Northeast Coast. Megan Bushhausen, our senior email developer for CinchMegan and CinchMegan. Megan, how are you doing this morning? I am doing good. It is cold here still, which is not good for my garden, but I'm doing good. Maybe we can meet in the middle with some some some Texas heat and some Northeastern, cool air. The way I need it. Yeah. Yeah. That'd be good. Alright. And then we're gonna head across the pond to France. Their afternoon right now, which you are jealous because they get to wrap up their day sooner than we do. So Yeah. Representing the senior manager of engineering over at Sinch Mailjet, we have Marion Deveaux. Marion, how are you doing this afternoon over there? Hi, everyone. I'm fine. Super fine. The weather is great here in France. I'm in Normandy. We're supposed to have rain, but today, that's really sunny, so perfect weather. Oh, lucky. Let's change let's swap locations. Maybe I can enjoy it over there a little bit more. We're good to have it, Marion. Good to see you. Good to see you. Good. Just gonna give a quick call to some of our, some of our viewers in here. It looks like we got some people from The Netherlands, Belgium, Barcelona, Greece. I saw some Texans in here as well. Good to see y'all. Copenhagen, London. Love it. Love it. Someone was calling out my 12 string guitars. Maybe later. And, also, Portugal. So good to see everyone in here. And, yes, ladies and gentlemen, this is a primarily, European topic today, but we've got all these amazing guests. So, also, really quick, wanna talk about our back end team really quickly. We've got Em Blitzstein representing the blog content side and Sinch Mailjet side as well in the house. Should be dropping some amazing content pieces in there that we can support you in these times. And, also, we're gonna give a quick shout to Jesus and Elena, helping answering questions on behalf of Sinch Mailgun and Sinch Mailjet in the back end. So massive shout out to them. Alright. So what were we talking about again? That's the main topic, the accessibility in email and the European Accessibility Act. So alright. And we obviously talked about ourselves, all that fun stuff. So let's get to that agenda really quick. So we'll talk about what is the European Accessibility Act, what you need to know about it. Number two, why you should send accessible emails. Megan Bushhausen gonna be bringing us some awesome best practices that she always knows. And, number three, we'll be talking about what do you need to do, to prepare for the European Accessibility Act. And then we'll talk about, you know, what is Sinch email doing about this whole thing. And then my favorite part towards the end, it's q and a time. Time for q and a. Also, I wanna give a quick shout out. Some people were asking, hey. Are we gonna see this, recording later on? Yes. If you, come back here in about an hour after Goldcast and also keep an eye out in your inboxes, we'll also send you the recap for this webinar. So do not worry, ladies and gentlemen. And in that, recap, you will be able to see all these slides and stuff like that. So, alright, Natalie. I think she's gonna talk about, what is the European Accessibility Act. Yeah. For sure. So, howdy, good morning, good afternoon, everybody. Let's just kinda give a brief overview of the European Accessibility Act. I know a lot of people here might already know, but for some people, especially maybe US bound people, they might not be aware of what the European Accessibility Act is or the EAA. So let's talk about it. So what is it? The European Accessibility Act or the EAA, you'll kinda hear that used interchangeably. It's a directive, from the European Union that was approved in 2019, but it is going into effect at the end of this month on, 06/28/2025. So, don't panic. Right? I know that that sounds like a really, really close date. Promise. Don't panic. Luckily, for for everyone here, a lot of different providers across the in email industry are doing things to make sure that, one, you guys are okay. You can do all of your email q and a, us included, on both the Sinch Mailgun and the Sinch Mailjet side. We're making sure that people will be a okay. But also, it's kinda one of those things where even though it is going into effect on the twenty eighth and you should absolutely be meeting that date if you can, Typically, fines will kind of have a bit of a grace period. Right? It's not like, you turn this on and then suddenly everyone's getting hit with fines. So just be aware. Always be mindful. That's kind of a a life mantra to have as well. So, but with that said, these requirements, do need to be met by businesses who are doing business with, anybody in the EU, especially as it comes to visual media, or media that can be consumed via a phone. So what does that mean? If you are sending email to the EU from the EU, then you need to be meeting these standards. So luckily, a lot of the standards that are outlined are pretty standard already within the email industry. So there are some things that are going to be new, but a lot, if you're already kinda doing your due diligence, you'll be okay. For US senders, and this is kind of like a a shout out to my people who've been in email for longer than than the average bear. This is kind of very reminiscent to the prep work for GDPR back in 2018. I was first hired, on the Sinch Mailgun during that being a little shocked, being a little, kinda taken aback, by all the prep that needed to be done. But it was one of those things where when the time came, everyone was ready to go. I think this is gonna be pretty much the same. So gonna feel very similar to that. It's, like, same same, but different. So something to think about. But I think what's more interesting and more important is why you should already be sending accessible emails. And I will pass it over to Megan. Thank you, Natalie. That was a great rundown of EAA. And if you want more info, our podcast that Thomas reduces email's not dead, we also have a whole episode on this. So once you are done with this, webinar, go listen to that episode for even more information. So let's talk about some accessible email, which is one of my favorite things to talk about. So some really important stats that I think people should know. According to the World Health Organization, we have an estimated one point three billion people who have disabilities, and that is about sixteen percent of the world population. Four point six billion of those users use emails. So around seven hundred and thirty six million email users have disabilities based on us doing a bunch of math. So it could be more, could be less. My caveat with numbers like this, it's a good, like, estimation, but you also have to keep in mind of what we are considering a disability here. So a lot of times when we think about disabilities in email, we're thinking about visual disability, maybe some motor skills that may be missing, those sorts of things. Often left out of the disability talk are things like cognitive disabilities. So ADHD, dyslexia, auditory processing, all those types of disabilities get left out. And what is also often left out are people who may be in countries that often aren't counted. So countries that often don't have as much money, so it usually will come down to those sorts of things. So we can assume that this number is actually higher, and we can assume that some people have permanent disabilities, and some people will have, not permanent disabilities, temporary disabilities. So one example we'll give for accessibility is people with low vision or no vision because these stats are just easier to get. The studies have been done on blind users. So around thirty six million people are blind, and eighty two point three percent of them have issues with screen readers on websites. And if they're having issues with screen readers on websites, and that's what these studies have been done on, not so much on email, it's a lot harder to get these stats for email specific. We can assume that these twenty nine ish million people are also having issues with email. So if we are not taking these people, this cohort of people into account, we're leaving over $59,000,000 on the table. So if you're thinking just in terms of money and ROI and stuff, you're leaving a lot on the table by not taking accessibility into account on top of it just being the right thing to do with sending accessible email. So what do we need to do to prepare? I'm gonna go over some high level things with email accessibility, mostly design related, so that no matter if you're using a drag and drop editor, visual editor, coding, you can do these things. I'm leaving out some of the more technical aspects of accessible email. I've talked extensively about code and whatnot, but we're not gonna talk about that here. So the first thing we're gonna talk about is our visual hierarchy, which is just a fancy way of saying how we organize visual information. And this newsletter in particular is one that I use often, because it's text based and has lovely visual hierarchy. So here are the three images. We can take a look at it real quick just so you can see it altogether. And let's talk about what's great about this email. It's good semantic structure. Basically, just meaning we have headers and body text and CTAs and images all laid out in a way that makes sense to the user, and you can easily scan it. The body text is sized appropriately. For your body text or email, you wanna add a minimum of 16 pixels. Our color contrast seems pretty good. That text is left aligned. I'll talk about that more in a moment. The CTA stands out. Things that I would change when I had originally checked this email, there was no alt text on the images, which is a big no no. And I personally would make the padding and the CTA's larger to make it easier to tap on mobile. So let's talk about that left aligned text. This is another email I really like to use. So this is one that when I originally saw it, the email all the way to the left is our original email. All that text is left aligned, and it's two large paragraphs. That can make it really hard to read. The reason why we left aligned our text is because it gives your eye a consistent place to go and read the email. If you look at the center text, your eye is jumping around everywhere. It can make it hard to follow the lines. You can easily lose your space. So I decided to do a really quick redesign. Nothing major. Small little adjustments. So our middle image is are the first adjustments I made. So we just took the two paragraphs, aligned it to the left. They are still two very big paragraphs, which can still make it hard to scan and read. So I decided, what would we do if what would it look like if we broke it up into smaller chunks? And the one on the right is the final result, which we saw initially on that little title slide. So in my opinion, it is much easier to read when they are broken up into smaller chunks and left aligned, and then you can easily get your information off to people, and they can understand it, read it, and action on it. Let's talk about contrast next. I think this is one that people often miss the mark on, including myself. So I'm gonna tell a story about this specific email. So this email looks very high contrast. You got the green there and the purple there. I always have stories, Tiberkineh. And the yellow and to my eye, yeah, this is pretty good contrast. But if I went and took those values and put them into the WCAG color editor, and WCAG is the organization that runs a lot of the accessibility standards, it actually fails by a pretty wide margin. And if we look at what these different email or, yeah, what these emails look like in the different versions of color blindness, this is what we get. And, like, you can kind of see it. I think it really becomes a problem on the total black and white. So the first two are red, green, color blindness. The third one is a yellow blue color blindness, and the last one is total. And, oh my gosh. Simon, thank you so much. No. That's really good for me to know you had trouble with it. So you see, this is where taking accessibility into my into your mind. I have the chat open, which is something I almost never do when I'm presenting, but I'm glad I have it this time. It's really good to know. I'm sorry that happened, but I also wanna show that even people who talk about accessibility all the time mess it up. And we always have more to learn and always have more to get better with. So what I did with this email before this presentation is I went in and found a color for a border that would give us the contrast that we needed to make it easier. And when I started flipping between the two, which I'll do right now, I noticed that that button was so much easier to see when I just simply added that border. And all I did there was put that yellow color into the WCAG contrast checker, and they have a lightness slider. And I just lived that slider down until on the graphical interface, I got it to acceptable and that it was passing. One thing to note is that WCAG has been working on new standards, and they're not out yet. But right now, everything's on a pass fail basis, and now it's gonna take be more on a scale. There's more to come on that. It's not finalized, but I was reading about it interest it, in recently, and it's very interesting. It just stumbled over my words there. My brain's moving faster than my mouth. So I would definitely look start looking that stuff up to see what's going on in the accessibility world and what the website of accessibility is working on because that'll filter down to email for sure. So let's leave that where it is, contrast, and let's talk about some alt text. So I'm gonna use that same email, and it might be small on your screen just from the nature of doing screenshots. But the alt text on my emails pretty much always describe the actual image, which is how alt text is supposed to be used. And this is where we're gonna talk a little bit about ecom emails a little bit and when you do, like, a full image email versus images and text. So I heavily do images and text. I think in SaaS, it's easier to do that than ecom. I know ecom likes to heavily use images, and I do have an example of that. But you can see here what the email looks like with the image versus without the image. And if there is no image with just the alt text, you can see that this email still works really well. Oh, just try to use my keyboard, and I cannot. Let's hit that arrow button. Alright. So here's an ecom example that I grabbed off of the front page of really good emails. I just they have a lot of beautiful emails that go on there that are complete images. So on this one, it does not describe the image. It gives you the offer. And if I were to do this email and make changes, I would not have made this all images. I personally would have layered the background image over underneath a box and would have made a lot of this text live text so that somebody could still read it and it could still be read easily by a screen reader. Because our either low vision or no vision users or somebody whose images just aren't loading are losing a lot of the experience of the email with how this alt text is written. Now does it technically work? Yes. Not being used though for what alt text is meant for, which is to describe the actual image. Alt text is not there to shove offers into. It's there to describe the image. So I will say the thing that I've been saying for ages, your images should enhance your email. It should not be your email. So, ecom, love you guys. You make gorgeous emails. I highly recommend finding a way to combine images and live text so you can get the best of both worlds. It is possible with a little bit of thought and maybe a little bit of upfront work for those email design systems and whatnot. This is this is awesome, Megan. Actually, Thomas Tiberkineh, if you could go back a second. So it's interesting, and I just like bringing, like, relevant, like, things that we're talking about. So there was a big, conference, a couple of weeks call a week couple of weeks ago, jeez, called Inbox Expo. And we actually there was a really good keynote on, like, trends or things that are happening, like, currently within the email industry, things that people are testing. And something that I think stood out to me that I think is is important to mention is, how to come up with that alt text and something that, I think is worth calling out, especially as people kind of use AI more and more. Do not use AI for alt text. This is something that I I think is just kind of important to make a mention of. Not that, you know, you can't use it in other areas of your workflows, but, typically, what happens is AI will get it wrong. You can, of course, always edit it. Right? Add that human touch. But it's important to just kind of remember to consider that, way ahead in advance. Don't lean on it too much. So just wanted to call that out really quick because it was right here at the end. I felt it was worth mentioning. So the latest and greatest from the email industry, if you will. But that said, what are we doing about it? So everyone kind of across the email industry, right, is is coming up with different ways on the ESP side to make sure that our customers are able to, approach, this change, appropriately and also kind of without fear. So we'll talk a little bit about what Sinch Mailgun is doing and then what Sinch Mailjet is doing at the same time. So it's a bit of what we're doing on this side of the house, but understand that if you already have a provider and you're not looking to switch, it's always important to go looking into your own resources and seeing what they're going to provide. If they aren't going to be able to meet those needs and they're important to you, then that's when it's important to start considering alternate solutions. So bear with me a little bit as we talk about this. So what's Sinch Mailgun done for me lately? Which is something I I say often, to just kinda help people out. So we are essentially bringing the latest and greatest, from email and asset and bringing it directly onto the Sinch Mailgun platform with Sinch Mailgun inspect, which is, I'm sure if you were at the last deliverability academy, you heard Thomas and I make a a couple of, like, elbow yuck yuck, kind of jokes about, something inspecting coming soon. This is that. Welcome, Sinch Sinch Mailgun Inspect. So we're bringing a lot of the tools that are known and loved on email and asset over to Sinch Mailgun. And with that, we will be, providing access to over 40 accessibility checkpoints, as a part of the inspect offering. So a lot of these, accessibility checkpoints, check not only for the EAA, but also the the the WAC AG, which is always a difficult acronym for me to to say, but that is the, the web content accessibility guidelines, for those of you who want the the full name. So we will be checking against things like, a lot of things that Megan actually just mentioned before. So color, color and contrast accessibility, code config code configuration for screen readers, alt text, seizure reaction accessibility, keyboard accessibility, input assistance, all of that good stuff. Really anything that, especially more closely aligns with, the 2.2 version of of WAC AG. I don't know if I'm saying that right or if the industry has decided it didn't work. Tag. We like saying WAC AG. WAC AG. Shout out to Jay Oren for all of it. Tag. K. K. K. K. K. K. K. K. K. K. K. K. K. K. K. K. K. K. K. K. K. K. K. K. It's it's it's one of the it's one of those things where I've where I've read. It's it's one of those words that you read a lot, and then you're like, am I saying it right? And it hasn't been until right now where I've had to say it out loud. So sorry about that, guys. Oh, man. But yeah. So WCAG. And with that, it will also be able to check against a lot of the same things that the EAA is checking for. So really good stuff there. Yes, WOG. For all the for all the 40 k fans out there. Big nerds. It's all good. So, that said, Sinch Mailgun Inspect is one of those, it's kind of our latest and greatest that we're putting on the Sinch Mailgun platform. And going forward, right, both within accessibility and outside accessibility, we want to add, more features to this that are gonna it kind of help the overall, QA cycle of the email long term. So we're looking at content span filtering, code analysis, all of that good stuff. Other things on inspect are also going to be, image and link validation. So it's not like you're only getting, like, bits and pieces. These are already kind of baked into it. And what's great is that it will have it has an API element, and we are currently going through the beta of the UI element within Sinch Mailgun. So whatever whatever way you wanna implement into your workflow, you will have that capacity. But I've I've yapped a lot about Sinch Mailgun, which is is something I do. It is a part of my job, but also what I do, I guess, in my free time, which sounds, silly now that I say it. But now it's time to talk a little bit about Sinch Mailjet, and I'll pass that over to Mariela. Yeah. And yeah. Sinch Mailjet is my work, so it's easy to talk as well. I'm not able to pronounce WCAG, so maybe it's because I'm not a team, speaker English speaker. But yeah. Anyway, I'll say WCAG if I need to pronounce it. Yeah. But coming back, at Merjet, so first, yeah, we simplify the compliance. Even if the accessibility will remain your responsibility as a marketer, as a designer, etcetera. At Sinch Mailjet, the email generated, within the Sinch Mailjet drag and drop editor, use accessibility code behind the scene. So you don't need to think about the HTML attribute length, that will be displayed, for you. Same. We discussed a lot about the ads. So, obviously, you need to configure, within the app, but it will be configured on the HTML, email sent, the way you set it on the on the platform. For, the what we call the expert editor, so if you want to write HTML or MJML directly within the platform, it will remain your call, to apply this on that. But, yeah, within every with every resource we provided and everything we already discussed, you should be able to do it. We've been also working to increase the customer education. We update it and we continue to review the documentation around this topic, making sure everything is accurate for you. But we also started to add to add, guidance and tips, for, in app to to follow, the compliance standards. The two topic on the bottom, are quite what about coming next. So we want to go deeper in accessibility, providing new feature set, that will be directly integrating into our into our drag and drop editor. And, the content check checking and the validation checkpoint from, what, Natalie said with Megan inspect We'll be directly integrating in that as well. And the last point is the fact that we also want the platform, available for everyone by make making fully, merchant fully accessible through incremental releases and improvement. So good to good things to come. And moreover, we also dedicated lots of time to train and monitor all our developers, in all the accessibility best practices, to make sure it's not just a concern for a few people, but a general mindset, and same. I think it was Simon who who speak, the fact that he was color blind, but we also have someone, within the team, who is color blind. So that's also useful to to detect all of that and and, yeah, making sure everything is accurate, on Mergent side. And now I think we need we can recap everything related to this topic. A good recap. Let's, let's all take it back in, shall we? Also, I just wanna give a quick shout out. I know we're getting some some reports that that the, some of the Sinch Mailjet blogs are unfortunately not loading. So just give us a little little time, ladies and gentlemen, and I will get that up and running. But thanks for bearing with us on that. We appreciate you. But, alright. Natalie and I are actually gonna let's take a look at all the things that we just talked about because there was a lot of good stuff. So Yes. I'll take this first one here. Yeah. So preparing for the EAA enforcement, that European Accessibility Act. Now is a great time for a refresh. So don't forget about refreshing. Begin with your highest touch templates first. And if you're missing one, apply a brand kit to your email designs, and I'll let Natalie take this next one. For sure. So after you've kind of checked your existing templates, and, again, like, what's important and I I say this because this is also what we do at Sinch Mailgun, so a little bit of a peek behind the curtain. Check your highest touch templates first. The ones that your customers are going to see the most, make sure that you are checking those for accessibility first. Don't you know, it might be very tempting to start alphabetically and go down or by date and go down. High touch first, then move on. But then the next thing is also just like testing workflows. So what is your current, QA look like for your emails? Do your designers have something in place? Do you know about it? Should you know about it? These are just kind of, some questions that are worth asking. I I'm more than sure that if you have an email team that you're working with, they are doing some sort of QA, but you might not know about it. And this is actually a really good time to talk to your email team and just see, like, hey. You know, how do how does your guys' workflows work? Do you mind taking some time to show me? Have we thought about EAA? I'm sure this is on your guys' radar. I just wanna make sure. It doesn't need to be an interrogation. Right? I'm not saying go out there and corner your email developers and designers about their jobs. But I am saying it's always kinda nice to know what your coworkers are doing. This is one of those instances. Right? And, right, say, you have a business where they're like, no. Actually, I had no idea. Right? Or this is news to me. Great. It's knowledge sharing. We love to see it. So doing that, first and foremost is really great. But then also, if you don't already have some sort of outline about where QA fits into your email development process. Even if you don't have it written down or you know where it is or you know how your workflows work, if you are that email designer who could be getting cornered by someone else who also saw this webinar, it's always nice to have those sort of processes written down for stakeholders. Even if it's just a quick page that's like, hey. Here's how the workflows work. Here's how the timing works. Here's how our general deployment, plays out. Hey. People love that. So having it having it ready, is a is a great way to just kinda say, hey. You know, we've done our due diligence. And it and it makes you look good too. So something to think about. Do you want me to handle the go going forward piece too, Thomas, or do you wanna take it? Yeah. For sure. And also too, I was gonna ask, if Megan wanted to touch and Marion if they want to add anything else to these to these pre enforcement. So I was gonna let Megan go first. I would say if, you know, if you don't have, like, an email design system in place yet, now is probably a really good time to start thinking about that and designing it. Because if maybe you're a little light on the, accessibility stuff, an email design system is a really great way to build it all in so you don't have to be doing emails from scratch every single time. And then all your good practices for everything are all baked right in that makes your QA go a lot more quickly. Love it. Very good. Marion, anything else to add on the, reinforcement? No. Lots of stuff already been said. So yeah. No. Use WCAG as source of truth, for for everything. Use the there's more and more tools, to check your your templates, so use them. You can cross also the results to make sure everything is compliant. So, yeah, definitely use the tool, that are proposed on on the web. Awesome. Awesome. And then, yeah, ladies and gentlemen, just make sure going forward, making sure your brand's doing doing everything you can do to become more accessible for your entire audience. I gave an example about this actually on our emails, not that podcast, but I saw this on Reddit. And there was a gentleman that was actually blind and that was attending NBA games here in The States. But they've actually developed technology where he can actually understand everything that is going on the court. So that reminded me, it's like, why are we not doing this for everybody? It's like there's so many more people that we're missing out that could be reading and understanding our emails. So it's like, ladies and gentlemen, we should be doing this in general. So make sure you're building that accessibility into your road map into your road map. So but I've got a moment here for everybody. Let's all say this together. EAA is going into enforcement on 06/28/2025, ladies and gentlemen. Say it together with me. 06/28/2025. 2025. Is that what you wanna call us? Yes. Everybody, remember this tape is coming. June 28. Say say it louder for the people in the back. Say it louder for the people in the front so we can all hear this. So June 28, do not forget this. So alright. There we go. Yeah. So we're getting some love for it in this. To add. Yeah. You are always looking out for me. Yeah. It's June 28. But alright. Awesome. Awesome. Looks like we got some time for some questions here. I was gonna give, if if if, Megan and, Marion wanted anything before we get going here into this q and a session. Let's do q and a. Alright. Sounds good to me. Sounds good to me. Alright. Moving on here. Okay, ladies and gentlemen. So favorite time of the day. We're all gonna take a look at these questions. Ladies and gentlemen, please upvote the questions that you want answered the most so we can get to these. And we're gonna take a look. So let's see here. Our blog is open. Go ahead. I I know a lot of people in chat are really concerned about the website not being able to see, the blog post and and so on and so forth. Don't worry. We have a we we created a web page that has also a lot of resourcing and documents, on both the Sinch Mailgun and the Sinch Mailjet side. A lot of the blogs that we've been linking are going to be linked on that landing page, and we will be emailing it to you. So, once our website starts, you know, having having a bit of a tummy ache, as a as a fellow tummy ache survivor myself, I always bounce back and I'm a lot better, once I have time to kinda relax. But all of that will be available to you, so don't stress. Promise we'll be able to figure it out. And it's currently getting solved on our end in the background. We just don't like, you know, broadcasting that from time to time. But I know it makes me feel better, so I wanna make sure you guys feel better too. But, okay, now we can go to questions. Sorry. All good. All good. Okay. Let's see here. Moving through the okay. So this is a really good one that I, I thought, this one's coming to us from Rachel. She asked, is EAA applicable if you send to customers in the region versus being a company in that region? Yes. Yes. So this is, kind of very, again, it's it's almost like the same same but different from GDPR. If you are sending to people in the EU, you need to make sure that you're following GDPR guidelines. This is very similar. Right? If you are sent if you have any sort of email recipients who are in the EU, your emails need to be accessible. That's just kind of the the long and short of it. Mary Anne, Megan, I don't know if you guys have anything to add. Yeah. It applies to anybody who lives in the EU worldwide. So if they live in the EU and they're visiting The United States, for example, it still applies to them like with GDPR. It applies to EU citizens worldwide. Just a worldwide email. Yeah. It's a worldwide email. I think another example, someone was just asking in the chat. Someone's asking, like, if if I send from The US, will I not get fined? So it's like, well, if you're saying email to the EU Yeah. And and this is also, like, I I I feel like we sometimes people will kind of, like, try to cherry pick a little bit, like, well but I don't think I sent to anybody in the EU regardless. There are there are people with disabilities in The United States as well who would greatly benefit from having accessible emails. So even if you aren't sure who's on your email list, I I wouldn't leave it to chance. Like, as a marketer myself, uh-uh. No. I don't wanna leave it to chance. I just want it to already be compliant. And as as someone who, has a hard time reading large large chunks of text, due to a disability myself, really, really helpful when you follow those guidelines. So just Also, I love go ahead. So if somebody has citizenship in the EU and they live in The US, even if you're a US company sending to US based subscribers, this it still applies to them because they have citizenship in the EU. Yeah. And, yeah, I think that accessibility is not just, I I want to avoid a fine or, yeah, this is not applicable to me. Once again, like Natalie said, that's for everyone. There's this disability everywhere in the world. So the better your email are, the better it is for everyone. Yep. Exactly, Marion. Just make it accessible. Just just these little tips fall Just be nice. Be helpful. Yeah. Exactly. Alright. Thanks, Rachel, for that one. We appreciate that. Let me go ahead and mark that one answered. Alright. Okay. See here. Okay. Cool. Moving down the line here. And if, my speakers if you all see one before I do, go ahead and call it out. I have one that I think that's uploaded pretty high that I think has a really fast answer, actually. Frank asks what are the rules of the EAA. So funny thing you asked, Frank, because they don't give us rules. It just says our emails have to be accessible, which is a little bit annoying on our part, but it just says accessible emails. And they say that it applies to b to c companies. So if you're selling to a consumer or your end user is a consumer, so b to c or b to b to c, it applies. It does not apply to business to business. So it has to be a consumer, and just as your emails have to be accessible, they don't say in which way it has to be accessible. It just says it has to be accessible, which is why we are continually and consistently going over these standards of accessibility. Because if you are following these standards of accessibility, you will be fine under the EAA. If you're already sending accessible emails, you literally have nothing to worry about. You're doing great. Maybe see if there's some places you could improve because we all can improve as I showed in this webinar, even myself. But you will be fine if you're sending accessible email. So that's my answer to that. Yeah. And Megan, that's also too why we're we've been following these WCAG guidelines. Correct? Right. Yeah. You follow those guidelines, you're good. Yeah. Pretty much. Yeah. And I think that that's, like, to to add, like, the more technical question to it. If you are not familiar with WCAG, go visit their website and go look at the overview of the latest version. If you've never heard it before in your life, now is the time to go and look at what you like and make sure that you are in compliance with their standards. Pretty much everybody refers to WCAG. So that is is a really, really good starting place. And I would I would love to have a whole webinar where we go over all of that, but we would be here for hours. I think we would get bored. But everyone would get bored because it's very it's very dry. It's important, but it is a lot of information. So I I recommend going through that on your own time when you can. But a lot of, like, the big hitters, were what, Megan went over today. So yeah. Cool. Hope that helps. Good one. Good one. Thanks, Frank, for asking that one. Thanks, Rick, for calling in. Alright. So moving down the line here. Let me see. We talked about region. Trying to see here, Chad. So many questions. Sorry. Give us a second. I love it. I know. Great when people have questions. It's the worst when you get to the end of something like this, and then everyone's like, nope. We're not gonna ask questions. We don't thank everybody for asking questions. But now we don't know which one to choose. I know. There's so many Megan, yeah, I think you're gonna have to pick one because of all of these. Yeah. I'm seeing okay. I'm just gonna start going down the list of, like, design related stuff. I see one about 16 pixel minimum rule is going to make our emails a lot longer. Could this could the text be smaller or everything needs to be 16 pixel minimum? Everything needs to be pretty much needs to be a 16 pixel minimum. Some people will make your footer a little bit smaller. There's no reason to make it smaller. Some people will go as small as 12 pixels on a footer. I don't recommend that because it can make your unsubscribe link harder to find, and you do want people to easily unsubscribe because if they can't, they'll they might start marking your emails as spam, which will tank your open rates and your conversion, so you don't want that. So 16 pixel minimum. If your emails are getting too long, which I know can happen in languages that are not English, like, I put together the, you know, German emails, and those emails, some of those words and phrases are so long. You might have to just rethink how you write some of that copy, but it really, really should be a minimum of 16 pixels. The emails will be so much easier to read, and I know this from experience of bumping things up even from 14 pixels to 16 pixels. It just makes those emails way easier to read and understand. Yeah. Definitely. They have it, folks. I I saw this one too. Is this EAA obligatory and will be monitored by vendor algorithms where the open will be really one. Yes. So this is kinda one of those things where as to the inner machinations of the EAA and and how they go through and they they monitor those things, a lot of it is done by reporting. So someone can report you, for this kind of thing. It happened with GDPR. I I promise you it will happen for EAA. It might take a little bit of time, but it will occur, and then people will be fine. Now the more interesting part of this question, I think, is will the open rate be lowered or something in case it is not followed? So I will say this. If your emails are broken or do not look good or simply are too long, if they look like spam, which a a fully accessible email, yes, could still potentially look like that. But if they look like spam, inbox service providers will mark you as such. So this is kind of a nice little sort of deliverability tidbit. Just go ahead and make them accessible because then that it it also means that you have a more well designed, more thoughtful email, which is less likely to end you in the spam folder just based on content alone. So just something to think about. This can impact your deliverability if you decide to just, like, go hog wild and not follow anything. You won't land in the inbox. I can I I can't promise you that, but I could I could I could promise you that kind of thing, sort of? You get it. Tell them. Tell them. Oh, man. I try to not be, like, too forceful, but also just think about these things before you press send, please. I I said Exactly. Exactly. It's like someone was asking in the chat, if there's no published rules or standards, how can they enforce? It's like, well, that's why that's why we're telling you about this now, please. K. Very nebulous. I know. Well and and what will happen is is they will likely point to WCAG and go, we've this has existed forever. Why haven't you looked at it? And then then you're then you're the silly Billy who didn't follow the rules. And I don't I don't want that for anybody here. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Someone just said go ahead. I'm pretty sure the enforcement would be enforced in few years as well, so be ready for that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Someone just said too in the chat, like, it's best to just have proof that you even tried and you did your due diligence. So please just, you know, give it the old try. Alright. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Just going going through there. Some of these have really quick answers too. Which screen readers do we rec or that are recommended? There are two major screen readers that are used on Apple. VoiceOver is built in, and on Windows, it's JAWS. They will read emails differently, which makes this all tricky also. Like, if you're coding emails, you probably have heard of aria labels and a couple of other cool things that you can do. And one screen reader will pick up on the aria labels and another one won't. So you need to test and see what's picking up where. There is no perfect in accessibility email. There's just doing the best we can. So you can check both those out if you have access to both kinds of machines. I can say if you're not used to using them, they're really hard to use because they're not built for people who can see. So I just wanna put that out there. I've seen people use, like, the Apple accessibility tools who have, lower vision really, really well where I struggle with it, with my glasses on because I just have no idea how to actually use them, and they're not built for someone like me. Alright. The next one I see here is with left aligning text. Some accessibility forums mentioned that, the direction attribute, equals LTR, which means left to right, needs to be declared. So if you don't have that direction attribute declared, it does not default to left to right. It just is not declared. So if you need to put it in a template and you don't want it to declare left to right or right to left, put u n d instead. That means undefined. That's your next best option. Better to have that than nothing at all. A lot of ESPs or their visual editors don't have a direction attribute in their code. Maybe they'll do it one day. Follow the email markup consortium. They are the ones doing primarily doing the work for the push for accessibility in the email space. Love it. Love it. Thanks, Joe, for that one. Moving down the line here. Megan, we're following you. Yeah. Following me. How do you change the mind of a company? Give them the stats. Start start telling them how much money they can lose, honestly. We quoted money in this webinar. Look at look up the stats. They exist. If they believe they're losing money, maybe they'll change their mind. You could also look at the emails and see what's the easiest thing to change. Right? So, like, maybe you add some headers, or maybe you have to left align some text, and you can show that the design isn't changed so much and just start making those changes slowly. It doesn't have to be everything all at once. Find the easiest things to change and change them. Mhmm. But, yeah, like, to Megan's point, like, the money aspect of this, they are leaving money on the table. Right? Like, you could have the coolest brand ever in existence. And if your emails are not accessible, if you're not doing anything to get into compliance, one, you're gonna get fined. So there's that money piece. You're gonna have to pay somebody for being out of out of compliance. But, also, when you leave out such a significant segment of your audience, you are you are hurting your business. Like, if we wanna talk about this from a capitalism perspective, right, you are leaving money on the table. And that that like, that's like, as a marketer, like, why on earth would you do that? It makes no sense to me. So, as as Megan said, like, reference some of the numbers that we listed here. Right? And, again, we will be sending a recording of this. Feel free to send them this webinar Yeah. Or even just, like, pull snippets from it. Leaving that kind of of money on the table, but also ostracizing and leaving out an audience, only looks bad on on your business, not anybody else. So just something to consider, and something to take to these to these clients who are being too stubborn. And you can also try to use a screen reader with the company and say, hey. Are you able to understand what's happening? So Yeah. Now we need to change. Yeah. And Em just dropped that that number we're talking about earlier. Globally, 1,300,000,000 people live with some form of disability, and then seven hundred and thirty six million are email users. I mean, that's that's concrete enough. Yeah. Alright. Cool. Cool. Cool. Okay. Moving that line here, shall we? Okay. And I mean, Megan. Yeah. I'm mixing up my people. Let's see here. Yeah. Tons of tons of design questions here. Yeah. I'm kind of going through a bunch of them. I see one, about level a big enough for EAA enforcement. Probably, but you really should try to go for triple a. Or not triple a, double a. Triple a is the best. I think most people try to get double a. Double a should be your minimum. Triple a is best. Sometimes I think triple a can be hard and a little bit unrealistic, so go for double a. And what resources can we use to test our emails? Email and asset, the company we work for, has all accessibility features in there. You could start up a free trial and check it out. There's unlimited previews, which is better than a lot of other similar services and can be pretty affordable, say, the freelancer or to the company for, like, a single seat if you need it. So check that out. Great things in that tester to make sure everything looks good. How important is it to have the lang attribute? Okay. So that's an interesting don't browsers and screen readers detect the body copy language nowadays? So that's really interesting because if there is no language attribute, the email will not be spoken with the correct accent. So, like, if Marion got an email in French and needed to use a screen reader and the French language attribute was not in there, the French would be read to her with an American accent, which could potentially be unintelligible to her because it's French with an American accent. Whereas, if it's the French attribute was in there, then it would be spoken to her and read out with a French accent. So that's why that gets really important because it it'll just it'll default to your system language, with not the correct so, like, yeah, not the correct accent. It's like if I tried to speak French to Marion, which I I I don't wish that on on her or any boyfriend else. And you know what I mean? Because, by the way, everyone is no one here is able to say Marion, which is the correct pronunciation. So Right. I can't even make it out. You know? So Right. Or imagine if I was in France or something and, like, I got an email being read out to me in English with a heavy French accent. Right? That one that I'm not familiar with. I might not be able to understand it. Oh, man. Gotta love these real life examples. That's what makes us all human. So what happens? Alright, ladies and gentlemen. We've got a few minutes left for some questions. So let's make these count. Let's see here. Yeah. I'm seeing some other ones. I feel like we've hit a lot of these other questions. How can I'm looking at oh, Jay, why are you asking me questions? You know everything. Hold on. Jay, you wrote a lot. Want to ask the background color and button contrast. Oh, for anyone being like, Megan, why are you talking this way? Me and Jay are friends. I just wanted to say that. Yeah. He's a homie. He's a homie. Jay's a real color and contrast. Oh, yeah. That's a good question, Jay. I think it's talking to people. Right? We just need to find the people to talk to, diversify our friend groups, find people in the industry to talk to. That's really, I the only way our our tools can only do so much. Right? So, like, I'm so thankful that, you know, Simon earlier said something about the email camp emails because I probably would have never known that otherwise. I have checked contrast on things with other people who have or, like, friends of friends who are color blind to make sure things are contrasted correctly. Another example I give is our Sinch Mailjet purple that we use on all of our emails. It was I was doing white text, purple background. It was failing in WCAG, which is a known issue with the current standards. A lot of times, like, white on brighter colors well, I don't wanna say bright, but, like, kind of brighter colors, sometimes fail when the contrast is actually good because of the luminosity, which is just like it's I can't even really explain it. It's just how the color contrast are that'll fail with CAG, but it's actually okay. The new standards are taking this into account. And I actually had somebody that I know send it to a friend who was color blind to make sure they could still read it easily, and I sent a couple of options. And they said that the white on purple was fine. So I really do think it's, you know, finding those people and those resources. Ideally and I don't know if this would ever happen. I've heard people advocate for it. Is that you would you're you know, companies would hire accessibility advocates to look at things and with different types of disabilities or who could test for different types of disabilities to make sure it all works looks good, works correct because, again, the tools can only catch so much and we're always, you know, adjusting and learning more. Yeah. And I think the other thing too is there are a lot of advocacy groups out there who are working towards, like, better accessibility for different disabilities. So that's in I you know, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna tell you how to how to live your life, but Google is a resource. And being able to just look up, like, just look up, you know, you know, color blindness advocacy groups. And then, typically, they have those resourcing. And even if they don't, send them an email. Like, like, actually reach out and go, hey. Like, I would really like to make the emails that my business is sending more accessible for people who are color blind. Do you have any resources that you that you recommend? Or, you know, where do you think is a good place to start? If it were me, I I would I would die to get an email like that. Right? For, like, the different, groups that I work with out outside of work. Like, those are the kind of emails I love answering. Those are the kind of people I want to talk to. Seek to understand. Educate yourself. Go find those advocacy groups. They will be more than happy to to help you out and give you some guidance. I promise. Yeah. I'm I'm starting to see the overall theme of this webinar is communicate better. Yeah. We're all in the communication space. Right? And we're trying to continue to communicate to people across the world in our in our ever growing larger and smaller world as it as it, you know, seems to fluctuate. But it's like, overall, let's just try and communicate better. Communicate to your to your to your, your brand managers. Communicate to your leaders. Look. Let's let's let's get on let's get on board. Let's get on board this WCAG EAA choo choo train. Alright? So I think I think it's the the best way. So alright, ladies and gentlemen. Okay. First first and foremost, we gotta thank our amazing, speakers for for joining us this this, morning and afternoon. And let me see if I can, get this slide, question to come off the screen. There you go. Stop sharing. First and foremost, Megan, you're gonna be busy these next few weeks coming up with these, new regulations coming. Where can people follow along with everything that you've got going on in the email world? Find me on LinkedIn. I mean, I probably won't be too busy. My emails are already accessible. I've done the work. But, yeah, follow me on LinkedIn. I show up on podcasts and webinars and all the things. So follow me there. She's gonna be all busy. Alright, Marion. You're next. Where can people follow along with everything you got going on or if they need to follow along with Sinch Mailjet stuff? Same. Only only team for sure. I will be busy because we continue to improve the platform, so it will take a while. But, yeah, I'm available only on LinkedIn, and I'm also conducting the webinar with our folks. So the French one, so I'm speaking French, easier for me. But, yeah, you can follow me during the those webinars as well. Love it. Love it. Good to see you, Megan. And moving down the line here, my partner in email, Natalie, where where can the people follow along with everything you got going on? Sinch Mailgun related, deliverability related? What you got going on. No worries. Well, for me, a big shocker, you can find me on LinkedIn. So feel free to to send me a message, add me, any of that good stuff. Just, you know, kind of do say where you heard of me because, otherwise, I'll be like, oh, and then I might I might decline it. I'll I'll be honest. But I'll chat about email there sometimes where I chat about email more is on Deliverability Academy. Thomas and I are cohosts, for the Deliverability Academy. We have a new episode coming up, June 18. Am I right, Thomas? Yep. June 18. Yeah. So if deliverability is a new concept to you, even if it's an old concept to you, join us. It's it's a very kind of relaxed forum where we talk about deliverability. We bring on guest speakers and all that good stuff. We just kicked it off. But, yeah, that is that is where you will usually find me. But if I go to any sort of in person events for email or things like that, I'll share that on my LinkedIn. So Love it. Love it. And you can follow me on LinkedIn as well. I'm the only Thomas Tiberkineh canarian out there. The rest are imitators. Make sure you also follow along with our podcast, Email's Not Dead. Just drop the link for that. We do have an episode featuring our own Megan Bushhausen talking about EAA and all the amazing resources. And we've got tons of resources actually in the episode as well. So make sure you check that out. But alright, ladies and gentlemen. This is the part where we have to say goodbye, unfortunately, but we have to go about our days. Marion gets to end her day, and the rest of us have to, you know, keep tracking along here. I can say it as well. Yeah. Lucky. But awesome, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us. Remember, don't forget, June 28, it's coming. It's when the EAA goes live. Don't forget that. So thank you so much, and, we'll see you soon. Take care, everyone. Thank you. Bye, y'all. Bye. Home.