[Athen] Accessible Newsletter programs and templates

[Top Tech Tidbits via athen-list]

Greetings everyone,

 

I believe we may be able to offer a somewhat unique insight here. As you may be aware we publish the Top Tech Tidbits, Access Information News, AI-Weekly and Title II Today email newsletters. We have been publishing via email to the AT community since 2004. Here is what we have learned in 20 years. If you want true, real, able-to-be-remediated accessibility in an email newsletter, then you must forego templates in their entirety. Relying on a template means relying on the template provider for remediation, which is, basically, a loop of death. Nothing every actually becomes accessible. You just spend your days trading emails with support in which they assure you that your concerns have been “passed up the chain.” To get around this, back in 2004, we switched to a provider (Contant Contact) that allowed us to code our own HTML for each newsletter. Not just the template. The contents as well. EVERYTHING. This way, we can remediate and standardize that code (which we have done over the last 20 years) to address all of the many concerns that readers have in accessing the newsletters using various assistive technologies. The result are the newsletters that tens of thousands of AT subscribers, all over the world, read each week. In short, the killer app for true email accessibility is the ability to custom code. How do you know your code is correct / accessible each time? You run it through the W3C’s HTML Markup Validation Service located at: https://validator.w3.org/. Each newsletter that we publish must pass this check. But be warned. Email HTML is WAY behind today’s HTML standards. So you will still need to live with some deprecations that you will not be able to get rid of. This is, very unfortunately, the current state of the technology where email accessibility is concerned. Hope this helps. Happy to answer any additional questions anyone might have.

 

Aaron Di Blasi,  <https://www.pmi.org/> PMP

 

 <https://www.linkedin.com/in/aarondiblasi/> 

 

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From: athen-list <athen-list-bounces at mailman22.u.washington.edu> On Behalf Of Monica Olsson via athen-list
Sent: Thursday, May 29, 2025 11:52 AM
To: Access Technology Higher Education Network <athen-list at u.washington.edu>
Subject: [Athen] Accessible Newsletter programs and templates

 

Hi all,

 

A colleague used Canva to create a newsletter and their director is asking them to reformat it into an accessible format! (Win!) I know that Venngage <https://venngage.com/>  offers a more accessible alternative to Canva and I plan to share that with their team, but hope to share other resources as well.

 

What programs or products do you use or have learned to a good job building accessible newsletters? This team would like to use something more robust than Word. Publisher has Newsletter templates - what do we think of something like that? 

 

Thoughts on MailChimp or other such communications technologies?

 

 

 

 

Monica M. Olsson (she/her/hers)

Policy Associate – Accessible IT Coordinator

Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges

•Email: molsson at sbctc.edu <mailto:molsson at sbctc.edu>  • Phone: 360-704-3922

 

The power of the Web is in its universality.

Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.

Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web

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