CU Denver was represented at this year's eduWeb Summit in Orlando, one of the nation's leading conferences for higher education marketing, communications, and digital professionals. Monica C Cutler, Director of Digital Marketing and Strategy for CU Denver Advancement, and Elly Lewis, Marketing and Communications Specialist for CU Denver’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, presented a poster session titled "Accessibility Without the Anxiety: Building Inclusive Emails Step-by-Step." The session highlighted practical, low-effort improvements communicators can make to create more accessible emails, using real CU Denver examples built in Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Rather than focusing on a complete redesign, the presentation emphasized six simple practices that can make a meaningful difference: appropriately sizing images, writing meaningful alt text, using true heading styles, improving text formatting for readability, creating descriptive hyperlinks, and ensuring sufficient color contrast. Attendees also received a one-page accessibility checklist to help incorporate these practices into their own email workflows.

As accessibility expectations continue to evolve, these small, intentional improvements help ensure our communications reach and engage the broadest possible audience. Whether you're creating emails for prospective students, current students, alumni, donors, faculty, or staff, accessibility benefits everyone and can be incorporated into your existing eComm process one step at a time.

Monica and Elly offer the reminder, “Accessibility isn't about starting over. It's about making small, intentional improvements that make communication work better for everyone.”