WAI needs to address email explicitly

None of the major email clients are accessible to people with low vision.
The Apple Client, Google GMail client, and MS Outlook all fail to provide
access. I think everyone has their own work arounds, but this is a
bottleneck issue. It shuts people out of meaningful discussion.

I am wondering if WAI should have a Technology Issues community group. It's
purpose would be to identify systemic problems like email that block
disability groups.

The purpose of the group would tease out functional categories that do not
work. The group would not render final judgements, but would collect and
categorize individual user issues and use this information to identify
systemic problems.

The Accessibility Guidelines process identifies global issues at the Web
level, but it does not really address significant functional categories
like email. Analysis of problem categories would probably identify holes in
the global web that the AGWG addresses.

Consider the problem of email clients. My individual complaint is that I
cannot enlarge any one of them enough to read email without a serious
struggle. Now, does Reflow apply. I don't know. Maybe not. Most clients
appear to be giant table layouts. If they do not use actual TABLE elements,
they use a DIV system that is isomorphic to a table layout. Reflow gives a
pass to tables. Does this mean email is not subject to reflow?

However, given the extreme operational overhead required to read text,
Reflow should definitely apply to email. Is this a systemic problem? I
think so. A community group could frame the problem so that future versions
of Accessibility Guidelines could address this issue.

I am sorry if I was unclear when I first brought this issue up. My own
understanding was unclear, but I know email is a serious problem for people
with print disabilities.

Sincerely, Wayne