Zeta Global Teams Up with Fireworks to Unveil New Specialized Athena Inference Models Using NVIDIA NemotronRead News
Accessibility entails creating customer experiences that can be accessed by people with a full spectrum of abilities, including physical, cognitive, hearing, and sight challenges. Accomplishing that involves a range of design enhancements, including full-width buttons, keeping sentences short, captioning videos, and using strong text contrast ratios.
Historically, brands have struggled to create broadly welcoming experiences, often because they can’t get a critical mass of support. Sometimes that’s because advocates lean too heavily on just one or two of the reasons brands should support accessibility when there are in fact four strong reasons to do so.
Accessibility is the right thing to do. Designing for accessibility is designing for the reality of being human. It’s recognizing that accessibility isn’t about “edge cases.”
The reality is that nearly everyone will experience challenges at some point—whether they’re permanent, temporary due to an injury, or situational due to the environment they’re in.
Not only do customers gravitate toward and stick with brands that meet their accessibility needs, but employees also find satisfaction in being a part of a brand that’s doing the right thing by their customers.
Building accessibility into your design and review process helps your brand meet its legal responsibilities while creating better customer experiences.
In the U.S., Department of Justice guidance explains that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) applies to the online goods and services of businesses open to the public. It also covers marketing and fulfillment channels, with more than one-third of all ADA lawsuits being about online experiences.
As teams use AI to generate code, images, and copy, accessibility checks should be part of the workflow. Reviewing that content against accessibility guidelines helps teams identify and address barriers early.
Accessibility can help brands reach more customers, make interactions easier, and build loyalty.
After all, the purpose of good design is to remove friction between people and understanding. Accessibility helps brands accomplish that more broadly for more people in more situations. Or put another way, it allows them to both maximize their reach and maximize every interaction. In today’s competitive environment, where consumers are more willing to switch brands, this is more critical than ever.
For brands already investing in mobile and dark mode optimization, accessibility offers another way to make experiences easier to use.
While AI has empowered assistive technologies for years to foster independence, the age of large language models (LLMs) and agentic workflows has made AI engines an increasingly important audience for brands. Whether employed explicitly by consumers or used by third-parties in service of their users, AI often sits between a brand and its audience. It takes in brand content and sums it up for people. However, if brands don’t present content in a way that AI can easily ingest, the resulting summaries may fundamentally miss the mark and end an interaction before it begins.
A number of tactics that increase accessibility for humans also help machines. For instance, emails where the key messages are conveyed with HTML text rather than text baked into images are far more likely to be summarized accurately by AI, in addition to being better for screen readers and for subscribers who have magnified their emails’ text to make it easier for them to read. On websites, alt text for non-decorative images helps both people and machines understand that content. And video transcripts are similarly helpful to both audiences.
In the near future, AI agents could dynamically reshape content to meet individual needs—perhaps by simplifying a complex experience for a user with cognitive challenges, recasting content using shorter sentences and more common words for a non-native English speaker, or refining a dense newsletter for a neurodivergent subscriber. Brand content that’s AI-accessible will also play an essential role in the rapidly growing AI commerce space.
If your organization is struggling to get consensus on investing more time and resources into creating more inclusive experiences, make sure you’re leveraging all four of those reasons, as they’ll appeal to different stakeholders.
Different stakeholders may respond to different reasons. Together, these four perspectives can help build support for more accessible experiences.
Knowing what to fix is the easy part. Doing it at scale across templates, modules, and every send is where programs stall. That’s where we come in.
The Email Accessibility Agent in the Zeta Marketing Platform (ZMP). Built on the knowledge of our in-house experts and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), the agent works inside the ZMP, right where your emails are built. The agent helps teams identify accessibility issues before send.
An accessibility audit from the Zeta Creative Studio team. Every audit includes a direct consultation with one of our experts. You leave with a prioritized list of findings, template-level fixes, and a roadmap. And because the Studio can implement the improvements, not just identify them, you’re not left with a report and a backlog.
Create an accessible design system: Work with the Zeta Creative Studio team to build a design system that embeds accessibility best practices into every module and every template, so your content is easier for people and AI systems to access and understand.
Learn key principles for incorporating these design elements for accessibility and inclusion into your workflow with Zeta.
Discover which email design shortcuts hurt performance—and what to do instead to build faster, more effective marketing campaigns.
Learn three timely email design trends that foster emotional connection and enhance user experience with softness, doodles, and rounded box outlines.
Zeta's unified, intelligent system transforms deeper customer understanding into confident action, faster execution, and measurable business outcomes.