A useful facility provided by most email software enables you to insert links to websites directly into the body of your email. Your email recipients are then able to access these websites directly by simply selecting the links.
Voting buttons are a different kind of link which, when selected, return a response back to the email originator. For example, you could choose to accept or decline a meeting invitation simply by selecting the appropriate voting button.
Links to websites
Even if you are producing your emails in plain text for maximum accessibility the addition of a web address will often be detected by the software which will automatically create the link for you. However, email addresses within the text are not generally recognised as such and therefore won't necessarily be hyperlinked.
Emails created in HTML may not be as accessible, see email formats, but do generally allow a range of hyperlinks to be inserted including links to email addresses.
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Make hyperlinked text short and meaningful. For example, Visit the RNIB website is accessible whereas "Click here" is not.
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In order to ensure that hyperlinked emails are still accessible when printed out it is good practice to ensure that the web address is included in the text.
Further information on linking in HTML can be found on the Web accessibility pages.
Voting buttons
Voting buttons provide a quick link back to the email originator with a specific response to a question. Voting buttons are accessible to screen reader users as long as they know they are being used. Therefore, it is a good idea to include a note in the body of your email to inform screen reader users that voting buttons are being used.
Calendar and meeting requests
An extremely useful feature of many email applications is the ability to handle responses to calendar and meeting requests automatically. In general, the buttons for responding to such invitations can be considered accessible.
However, depending on the application being used the message area itself may be in HTML. Any attachments can end up as part of the HTML and consequently be difficult to locate. This potential problem is very easily avoided by providing information about the invitation in a separate email.