Constant Contact is an online marketing company specializing in digital marketing advice and guidance. They offer a complete suite to businesses looking to boost sales and customer engagement. Their products range from automation to live help.
But how accessible are they? Let’s dive into their website, mobile app, and subscriber emails to see how focused they are on accessibility.
Website
The appropriate use of contrast makes for excellent color accessibility on their site. The background is white with bold black text, and where the text isn’t black, it’s blue, which still provides sufficient contrast against the white background. This helps differentiate the words from the page, reducing the likelihood that people with vision disabilities will struggle to read the content. The text uses an accessible, sans serif font that meets WCAG size, resizing, and spacing requirements, adding to its readability.
The site is also keyboard navigable. The menus can be tabbed through, all links are accessible via keyboard navigation, and dropdown menus are activated by click actions, not hover actions. This is important because hover menus can be difficult to navigate for people with motor function loss or who cannot use a mouse. Click menus, on the other hand, do not change the interface without explicit user action, making them more accessible.
The images have alt text, which is essential for people using screen readers. Without alt text, screen reader users would not know what content the images on a page contain.
Overall, however, Constant Contact’s website is mostly accessible.
Mobile app
Like the website, Constant Contact’s mobile app has a black-on-white color scheme with some white-on-blue, providing sufficient contrast. Some of the buttons in the app – like the button for editing a post – are large and bold, making them more accessible to people with limited range of motion. But others, like the download button, are small and could be hard to tap for users who have trouble with touchscreens. Increasing the size of these smaller buttons would make the app more accessible.
Constant Contact’s app is only moderately accessible as is.
Subscriber emails
Like their website and app, Constant Contact’s subscriber emails have sufficient color contrast to pass WCAG AA requirements. The default emails have a white background with dark text and a 6.6:1 contrast ratio. If the device or email client is in “dark mode,” the emails have light blue text on a gray background. This is also sufficient color contrast to pass WCAG AA requirements.
However, the text itself is well-spaced and sized as recommended by WCAG guidelines, and the wording is concise.
The links in the email follow best practices. It’s clear where they go and which parts of the text are links – no hidden surprises! The one part of the email that does have a naked URL is preceded with the warning, “copy and paste this URL,” so screen reader users will know it’s coming.
Constant Contact’s subscriber emails need some work, but they’re still moderately accessible.
Conclusion
Constant Contact, a digital marketing service, has good accessibility features on its website and mobile app. Their emails also follow best practices for accessibility. However, they need to do some work in other areas to be fully accessible, like improving the color contrast in their emails and addressing the moving graphics on their website.
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