AOL recently rolled out a new web based mail client for AOL.com and AIM.com and, as part of this change, they are now disabling images by default. This brings AOL’s online email clients into the dominant group of clients that block images by default. By now you just have to expect that a vast majority of your contacts will first see your message without images; it’s just a fact of life.
What am I to do?
With AOL, as with most mail clients, if your From Address (as set in Sender Options when sending your message) is in your recipient’s address book images will be displayed. So encouraging customers to add your From Address to their address book is still a good practice.
Contacts can also choose to turn images back on by default, but the majority of users will choose not to do this. For those customers who won’t add your From to their address book, and who haven’t turned images on, you need to take the next step: Alternate Text.
What is Alternate Text?
Alternate Text, often called an Alt Tag or Alt Text, is an attribute of an image that is shown when that image isn’t loaded. You can easily add Alternate Text to any image in your message within the image popup in the message editor. And you should always do this to every image as a rule. If you are editing HTML by hand, you just need to add an Alt attribute to your images.
That’s it, there’s not too much to do on your part. Many of you were probably already encouraging customers to add you to their address book and using Alternate Text for all your images. For those of you who weren’t, now you know, and you should start implementing these changes right away!
Adam Covati
Product Manager at Bronto
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