Some questions on accessibility in email — answered
Making email accessibility real
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As email marketers, designers and developers, we’ve been implementing accessibility into our emails for some time now. But has it made it easier for the recipients of those emails to read and interact with them?
I wanted that question answered, and this led me to approach and partner with Action Rocket, launch ‘Email for All’, and our recent survey, to find out.
To answer that question, we, in fact, have to answer many questions. So, in our first survey, we asked questions about the visual presentation of email elements. The results were interesting, intriguing and insightful.
Are sans-serif fonts more accessible than serif fonts?
It’s often argued that sans-serif fonts are more accessible than serif fonts, and there’s nothing written in WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) to recommend one over the other. We presented both in our survey, and the results were interesting.
79% of participants found Roboto, a sans-serif font, easy to read, and 74% found Roboto Slab, a slab-serif font, easy to read — resulting in the sans-serif font being only 5% more readable! However, this 5% difference could be explained by the fonts similarity in that they’re both from the same typeface family.
It would be interesting to see what the difference would be when comparing Roboto to serif fonts like Georgia or Times New Roman.
The monospace font, Roboto Mono, was found easy to read by 45% of participants, and the script font, Dancing Script, was found easy to read by only 2%.
