Email accessibility is about ensuring your emails can be read and understood by everyone — including the roughly 25% of people who have a disability that affects their experience of digital content. It's not just the ethical thing to do — it's also good for deliverability.
This Week’s Lesson
Key accessibility dimensions for email: visual (colorblindness, low vision, blindness), cognitive (reading difficulties, attention differences), motor (difficulty using a mouse or touchscreen). All three affect how a significant portion of your audience experiences your email.
ALT text for images: every image in your email should have descriptive ALT text. Screen readers read ALT text aloud for visually impaired recipients. Many email clients block images by default — ALT text is what non-visual readers and image-blocked clients see.
Color contrast: text must have sufficient contrast against its background. The WCAG 2.1 standard requires a 4.5:1 contrast ratio for normal text, 3:1 for large text. Low-contrast text (grey on white) is beautiful on a designer's retina screen and unreadable for many recipients.
Semantic HTML structure: use heading tags (h1, h2, h3) in your email HTML. Screen readers use headings to navigate documents. A flat sea of paragraphs with no headings makes email impossible to navigate efficiently for screen reader users.
Link text: 'Click here' and 'Read more' are meaningless to screen reader users who hear link text in isolation. 'Download the Deliverability Checklist' gives full context. Descriptive link text also improves usability for everyone.
Readable font sizes: minimum 14px for body text. Decorative fonts and condensed typefaces are harder to read for people with dyslexia and low vision. Default to system fonts or simple, widely-available typefaces for body text.