| > Formatted text is less accessible. Is this universally true? I'm not an accessibility expert but from working on a couple 508 projects it seems that formatting such as headings improves accessibility and makes navigation easier. > If you find you are relying on it, then you should improve your writing skills Some of the content I email includes screenshots of issues, photographs from studies, iconography, and data visualizations. Beyond ensuring that I include accompanying/alternate text I accept that these will not be accessible. Other content includes hierarchical lists and snippets of tabular data. While these can be creatively emulated using plain text I find that people doing so typically resort to a jarring sort of ASCII-art approach that ends up being even less accessible than just using the proper semantic tags or markdown. More broadly I find it disappointing that we ended up in this situation where technical constraints dictate what is good writing. Italics has been part of writing for hundreds of years and now it's relegated to "markup" because of decisions some computer engineers made sixty years ago. Can you imagine if the ASCII standard had stuck with the initial all-caps specification and relegated lowercase letters to be markup? Would we now be arguing that people who don't write in all caps "should improve [their] writing skills"? Personally I prefer structured text to either plain or formatted text. Formats like markdown aren't perfect but they basically provide what I need so it's disappointing that email clients force us to choose between the extremes of plain text and HTML. |