This Month in Community: Accessible Emails, Black Friday + Coding Standards

3 min read

The Litmus Community is the place for email designers and marketers to discuss their craft, talk about industry news, and join in the (occasional) controversial rant and discussion.

In case you haven’t been keeping up, here’s what happened this month in the Community.

What email resources do you want to see from Litmus in 2016?

Our very own Justine Jordan helped remind the Community about some of the resources we’ve released over the past year. More importantly, she asked Community members what they wanted to see from Litmus next. A few people have already mentioned more B2B and SMB resources and practical tools and guides. We’d love to hear from more of you. Jump into the thread and let us know what kinds of resources you want to see from the Litmus team in the next year.

Designing Mail for Blind Readers

Community member Adam Murphy brought up an increasingly important (and often ignored) topic: accessibility in email. In this discussion, he solicits the Community for advice on building emails for blind readers. A few people are quick to jump in and offer suggestions about using semantic markup to provide better structure for screen readers. Have any more tips on designing accessible emails? Let us know about them over in the Community. This also seems like a good opportunity for a new resource from Litmus…

The Black Friday Thread

To help celebrate one of the biggest days in the email industry, I floated a discussion asking for everyone’s favorite Black Friday emails. Tons of people jumped in, posting links to some great email campaigns from a variety of companies. A few of them even made it into the latest episode of The Email Design Podcast, including this instant classic from Action Rocket:

Do you think we’ll ever have standards for coding emails?

While there have been a few posts about email standards in the past, we wanted to bring up the topic one more time and see if opinions had changed. What followed was an interesting debate on the state (and lack) of email standards and most people coming to terms with the usual, fractured email rendering landscape. While there have been attempts to get email client vendors on board with coding standards in the past, they have all largely failed. As some pointed out, our best bet might be to target the development and consolidation of rendering engines that can then be used across multiple email clients. What do you think?

Is there a reliable 1px horizontal rule method?

On the more practical side, Community member Joe P. asked around for the best way to implement a horizontal rule. While simple horizontal lines are a common design element, they can sometimes be tricky to use in email thanks to poor email client rendering. We’ve probably all used an image to get the job done before, but some better solutions are proposed over in the thread, including using and styling the <hr> tag and relying on CSS borders on table cells.

Join the Community Today

There is a ton more happening in the Community than what’s described here. Keep up with the latest news, techniques, and tools by joining the Litmus Community today. It’s free to join and filled with the best minds in email marketing.

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Jason Rodriguez

Jason Rodriguez was the Community & Product Evangelist at Litmus