Hi, I’m Chris Walker, a Software Engineer leading an effort across Outlook to make it easier for you to create email communications that are accessible to everyone.
Ensuring the accessibility of your emails is your responsibility. By creating and sending accessible emails, you ensure that recipients can access, read, and use the information they contain. Ensuring images have alt-text for screen reader users and that text contrasts work for people who are color blind are just a couple examples of how we’ll help you get this experience right. That’s why we’re excited to share an update designed to help ensure you can make your emails accessible.
Nudge others to make their mails accessible with MailTips
Whether you have a visual impairment or want to lead your organization in inclusion, the Accessibility MailTip is one tool that helps you check for and fix accessibility gaps in your mails.
To set up the Accessibility MailTip, first go to Outlook on the Web. You can find your OWA link on the File ribbon tab, under Account Settings. Go to Settings > View All Outlook Settings > General: Accessibility and select the checkbox.
From then on, when individuals inside your organization send you an email and one or more accessibility issues have been identified in their email, they will see a notification that a recipient prefers accessible content and will be prompted to review and fix the issues.
Update (6/30/2021): Starting with version 16.0.14114.10000, individuals using the Outlook desktop client will be nudged to fix accessibility issues in more scenarios, such as composing an email to a large group. For more information, see Sending accessible emails in Outlook for Windows.
Additional references
Availability
Accessibility MailTips are available to users running Insider build 1911 (12130.10001) or later on Windows. It is available in Outlook on the Web as well. As a reminder, Windows users will need to setup Accessibility MailTips on the web at this time.
Accessibility MailTips work with commercial Office 365 accounts, for emails within a tenant only, and where the user is directly listed on the to/cc/bcc lines.
We typically release features over some time to ensure that things are working smoothly. This is true for Insiders as well. We highlight features that you may not have because they’re slowly releasing to larger numbers of Insiders. Sometimes we remove elements to further improve them based on your feedback. Though this is rare, we also reserve the option to pull a feature entirely out of the product, even if you, as Insiders, have had the opportunity to try them.
Feedback
If you have any feedback or suggestions, you can submit them using the Help > Feedback menu. We’re excited to hear from you!
Learn what other information you should include in your feedback to ensure it’s actionable and reaches the right people. We’re excited to hear from you!
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