If you’re like me you have subscribed to various email lists or advertising newsletters from specific company. You want to know about specific airfares when they’re being offered that may allow you to travel to destination X for a low rate. You also want to know when your next credit card payment is due. You get the emails from the companies and your modern email client (mine is Thunderbird) blocks the external images because they’re sometimes used by spammers to track legit email addresses. The blocked images, if they don’t have alternative text, give you the broken image symbol in the email and the ‘buy now’ link is just a broken image and nothing indicates that you should be able to take advantage of the lower fares from within the email. In essence their whole plan to draw you in has failed miserably because they have failed to do something that is so simple that even spammers have figured it out.

What do the links above go to in the original email? I can’t tell. And if I was blind or visually impared and wanted a screen reader to tell me what they go to? Tough. SilverPOP, the service that sent this email out doesn’t care about its customers enough to actually put in descriptive words that would tell me what those links go to.

Thunderbird adds a button to show the images in the email when it has blocked the images. However, it is possible that the images contain text that a screen reader will still not see. This is the kind of stuff that would be easy to do, and add value to the email for EVERY user who has images blocked, a restrictive proxy server, visual imparement and or the email composer forgot to link to an external image and the URL is broken.

Think twice and add alternative image text, it could be effecting your bottom line!