Nonprofit Online News adopts The Text Email Newsletter (TEN) Standard

Howard Lake | 14 April 2007 | Blogs

Congratulations to Michael Gilbert of the Gilbert Center. He has just revamped his excellent email alert Nonprofit Online News to make it more accessible. Specifically he has adopted The Text Email Newsletter (TEN) Standard as developed by E-Access Bulletin and published by Headstar in partnership with the Royal National Institute of the Blind.
Discovering a few years ago this accessibility standard which makes the already fairly accessible plain text email message further accessible was quite a revelation. UK Fundraising News, our fortnightly email newsletter, introduced some of the standard’s recommendations in its plain text version, although we have certainly not adopted all of them yet – mea culpa.
So well done Michael for doing so, and for publicising the standard. He writes that soon “we’ll start incorporating an introduction to the standard in our seminars and publications about the use of email. It seems to me that civil society organizations, with their inherent agenda of public benefit, ought to be thinking very hard about accessibility.”
He also adds further reason, if one is needed, to adopt the standard: “in a time of growing suspicion of complex email, the TEN standard could be a very compelling proposition”.

About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale. He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.