Email accessibility might seem straightforward. Just add alt text to your emails’ images, and you’re all set, right?
…Wrong.
While adding alt text is one requirement, there’s a whole list of others to follow, too, if you want to help as many recipients engage with your emails as possible.
Here’s our TL;DR email accessibility checklist:
- Is your email text easy to read?
- Is your email well-structured?
- Does your email text use appropriate fonts and font sizes?
- Are your link anchor texts descriptive?
- Do your images have alt text?
- Do your email’s colors have sufficient contrast?
- Does your email avoid flashing and flickering content?
- Do your video embeds have subtitles?
- Is your email compatible with mobile devices?
- Have you put up an accessibility notice?
You can also use free tools like A11y Quick Check and Accessible Email to do quick accessibility tests.
Email accessibility isn’t a nice-to-have. It may be a must-have if your business is based in the European Union (EU).
This is due to a legal directive called the European Accessibility Act (EAA), which requires that EU-based businesses (except micro-sized ones) make their emails accessible by June 28, 2025.
I know law things can seem daunting, but don’t worry. Tapping into my legal training, I’ve read the EAA and am here to break its requirements down for you!
Let’s check out — in simple terms — what email accessibility is, plus details on our 10-step checklist for sending accessible emails in compliance with EU law.
What Is Email Accessibility?
Email accessibility is the designing of emails in a way that helps recipients perceive, operate, and understand the email’s contents. The email must also be robust enough to let users interact with it using different device types.
The EAA also follows these four principles of perceivability, operability, understandability, and robustness. Let’s explore them a bit more:
Perceivability
Perceiving an email means using your senses — sight, smell, hearing, touch, and taste — to get information on the email’s contents.
Many people perceive emails by viewing them with their eyes, while others perceive emails by listening to them being read out.
Operability
Operating an email means to use the email. This could be reading its text or clicking its links.
Understandability
Understanding an email means knowing what the email says. Just because someone can read (i.e., operate) an email doesn’t mean they can understand it.
For example, people might be confused if you use more complicated words like “onomatopoeia” or “pluralism” in your emails!
Robustness
An email is robust if it is compatible with various device types.
For example, people might read your email from their mobile phone. They might also listen to the email with a screen reader if they have a visual impairment.
Why Is Email Accessibility Important?
Email accessibility is important for getting your emails’ messages across to your recipients. That’s because some recipients may have visual, intellectual, or hearing impairments that affect their ability to interact with your emails.
If a recipient doesn’t know what your email says, they’ll be less interested in engaging with it, clicking its links, and buying its promoted products. As a result, your email will be less effective in nurturing your audience and driving sales.
What’s more, accessibility may be a legal requirement.
The EAA requires EU member states to put in place laws to ensure that businesses in their countries send accessible emails. The EAA also requires these laws to take effect on June 28, 2025.
In other words:
If your business is based in the EU, you may be legally required to ensure email accessibility from June 28, 2025, onward.
This is unless your business is excused from compliance — which is what I’ll cover next.
Who Needs to Make Their Emails Accessible?
Under the EAA, all businesses in EU member states need to make their emails accessible. The exception is if the business is a “microenterprise” that:
- Hires fewer than 10 persons, and
- Has an annual turnover or balance sheet that doesn’t exceed EUR 2 million.
If your business isn’t a microenterprise, and doesn’t comply with the EAA’s accessibility requirements, you may get slapped with legal penalties. These penalties depend on the country you operate in.
If you operate in Ireland, for example, you’ll be required to take steps to make your inaccessible emails accessible. If you don’t, the authorities may request you to improve your emails’ accessibility and direct you to provide proof of compliance.
Failure to comply with the directive is an offense that can lead to up to a €60,000 fine and/or up to 18 months’ jail.
But even if the EAA doesn’t require you to make your emails accessible, I’d recommend you still do. This way, more recipients can engage with your email content, as mentioned earlier.
How Can You Know Whether Your Emails Are Accessible?
While the EAA says your emails need to be accessible, it doesn’t provide many details on how you can do this. It also doesn’t say what’s considered an accessible email and what isn’t.
So, for these matters, we’ll need to look at the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
Developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the WCAG is a set of accessible standards for making web content (including emails) perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust.
Do these principles sound familiar? They should, because the EAA uses them too!
The WCAG has three conformance levels: A, AA, and AAA, with level A being the easiest to meet and level AAA being the hardest.
Meeting level AAA is especially difficult and usually isn’t needed. So, aim to conform to level AA. That would be good enough.
For this guide, I’ll refer to the latest version of the WCAG — i.e., WCAG 2.2.
10-Step Email Accessibility Checklist
Here’s a detailed 10-step checklist to get your emails compliant with the EAA, based on the WCAG’s recommendations.
From this checklist, you’ll know:
- Which EAA accessibility principle each step helps you conform to,
- How following each checklist step helps with accessibility, and
- How to do each recommended step.
1. Is your email text easy to read?
Relevant EAA accessibility principle
Understandability
How does improving readability help with accessibility?
Readability is a measure of how easy a text is to read.
The more readable your email is, the more likely your recipients can understand it — and take action on it. This is even if they have basic educational qualifications or an intellectual disability.
Let’s say we have this email text:
“We are pleased to impart to you, our most valued patron, the introduction of an innovative and multifaceted functionality designed to elevate the operational capacity of our software platform to previously unattainable altitudes. This newly unveiled feature, which has undergone a thorough and meticulous phase of conceptualization, development, and testing, will undoubtedly facilitate a substantial augmentation in your user experience by providing an expanded array of tools and utilities, hence enhancing the holistic efficiency of your daily engagements with the system.”
This text is soooo hard to read.
It uses big, fancy words that not everyone may be familiar with. Its sentences are also quite long, which makes following the discussion difficult.
The same text would be much more readable if I simplified (and summarized) it to:
“After lots of testing, we are excited to announce a new software feature that will help make your daily tasks easier.”
This one sentence conveys the same meaning as the confusing paragraph of word salad above, and in much fewer words too!
How to improve your emails’ readability
To improve your emails’ readability, it helps to:
- Stick to common words that people are more likely to know. For instance, write “important” instead of “paramount.” And “improve” instead of “augment.”
- Use shorter words. Shorter words are generally easier to read. Replacing “however” with “but,” and “therefore” with “so,” are good examples here.
- Write shorter sentences. Break up long sentences into multiple shorter ones. Each sentence should cover just one point (or two points, max).
You can also run your writing through readability checkers like Hemingway Editor. These apps grade your writing’s readability and can even suggest improvements.
2. Is your email well-structured?
Relevant EAA accessibility principle
Operability
How does good email structure help with accessibility?
Readers may have trouble reading your email if it looks like a plain wall of text.
Like this email, for example, which I created in Brevo:
Sure, your content may be useful to the reader. It may even be written in simple language (as discussed above).
But if your points look like they all blur together, with no differentiation among them, your email will be hard to read.
What happens then?
Recipients may get turned off from reading your email. They might even delete it instead! This isn’t ideal when you’re trying to engage them.
How to make your email’s structure more accessible
Here are ways of improving your email structure for accessibility:
- Adding line breaks and headings to break up content sections. Line breaks split large paragraphs into shorter, more readable ones. Meanwhile, your headings summarize the upcoming discussion. This helps readers know what to expect from the discussion and decide whether to read it.
- Using colored layout boxes. Containing your content sections in different-colored boxes is super-effective in differentiating them.
- Formatting your text using bold formatting and lists. Use bold text to emphasize key points, and lists to group related points.
Check out the email below. It’s the same email from above, after applying these tips to improve its structure. (I added some images to give the email more color, too.)
Isn’t it a more pleasant read now?
Tip: Once you’ve decided on an accessible email structure, save it as a template. This way, you can easily reuse it for future emails.
3. Does your email text use appropriate fonts and font sizes?
Relevant EAA accessibility principle
Perceivability
How do appropriate email fonts and font sizes help with accessibility?
Fonts are templates for the way letters appear on the page. For example, you’ve probably seen fonts like Arial, Times New Roman, and Comic Sans before.
Choosing an appropriate font improves accessibility because readers have an easier time identifying the letters you’ve used. They can then string these letters together into words, and these words into sentences, to piece together what the email says.
Your email text’s font sizes also shouldn’t be too big or too small.
Words that are too small on the screen are hard to read. Meanwhile, words that are HUGE take up a lot of space. They force your recipients to read slower and scroll your email more to take your full message in.
How to choose appropriate email fonts and font sizes
Use a font provided by your email platform. Chances are it offers these fonts as they’re ideal for email use.
For instance, Klaviyo comes with fonts like Arial, Arial Black, and Century Gothic.
If you want to use a custom font, pick something that isn’t too cursive, scribbly, or thick. This way, you won’t frustrate recipients with undecipherable emails.
What’s a good font size depends on your chosen font. In general, though, something between 11 px and 16 px might work for normal text.
4. Are your link anchor texts descriptive?
Relevant EAA accessibility principle
Operability
How does descriptive anchor text help with accessibility?
Anchor text is the text that links to another webpage. Make it descriptive, where it summarizes the page it links to.
This is especially important for recipients who use their screen readers to read out just the email’s links. These people won’t have any surrounding context on the links. So, the anchor texts need to make sense on their own.
Want an example of descriptive anchor text? I’ll give you two.
Check out this paragraph from one of our email newsletters:
The paragraph has two links with these anchor texts:
- “interview series with newsletter creators”
- “sign up for our Creator Newsletter”
These anchor texts make it clear that when users visit these links, they’ll get to read an interview series with newsletter creators or sign up for our Creator Newsletter (as relevant).
How to write descriptive anchor text
Your emails’ anchor texts should be relevant to the pages they link to. For example, if you’re linking to a product page, your anchor text could be the product’s name or “Shop Now.”
Or, if you’re linking to your Instagram account, your anchor text could be “Instagram.”
Don’t use vague anchor texts like “Click here” or even just “here.” These phrases don’t provide much information on the pages they link to.
5. Do your images have alt text?
Relevant EAA accessibility principle
Perceivability
How does image alt text help with accessibility?
Adding image alt text is the step that might immediately come to mind when you think about email accessibility. So, let’s talk about it.
Image alt text is a text description of an image. Take the email signature in this Kit marketing email, for instance:
“Caitlin headshot” is alt text for a headshot image of Caitlin from Kit’s marketing team. Thanks to it, you’ll know that’s what the image shows even though you don’t see it.
Alt text is helpful for recipients who can’t see your images. This could happen if their Internet is down or they’ve disabled images in their email client, for example. In these cases, they can read your images’ alt texts instead.
Alternatively, if they have a visual impairment, they can have their screen reader read the alt texts to them.
How to add image alt text
Any good email service provider will have a setting for adding alt text to your emails’ images. Here’s the setting in MailerLite’s email editor, for instance:
But what should your alt text be?
Since alt text is meant to replace the image, it should succinctly describe the image. For example, the alt text for a product image could be the product’s name.
To preview your emails’ alt text, set up your email client to disable images by default. Then, send a test email to yourself. Your alt text will appear in place of your email’s images.
Here’s how this looks in Gmail for one of our newsletters — where Gmail says images aren’t being displayed and shows the “emailtooltester logo” alt text instead of our logo image:
6. Do your email’s colors have sufficient contrast?
Relevant EAA accessibility principle
Perceivability
How does sufficient color contrast help with accessibility?
Color contrast refers to the difference between light and dark colors, which helps colors stand out from one another. There should be sufficient contrast between your text and background colors so that users can read the text easily.
Take this sample email, for example:
The light gray text is set against a light blue background, making it hard to read.
I can improve the color contrast by making the background a darker blue:
Alternatively, I can darken the text’s color:
And voilà — in both scenarios, making out the text has become much easier.
How to maintain good color contrast in your email
A quick method of checking for good color contrast is to eyeball your email.
Can you make out its text easily? If you can’t, your recipients most likely can’t either.
But if you want to be more scientific about it, use a color contrast checker tool like WebAim’s contrast checker.
Put in the HTML color codes for your foreground color (e.g., your text color) and background color. When you do, the tool will tell you whether the color combination passes WCAG’s AA and AAA conformance levels for normal text, large text, and user interface components (like email button text).
The tool will also tell you your colors’ contrast ratio. The ratio should be at least 4.5:1 for normal text, and 3:1 for large text, to conform to WCAG’s level AA.
If you want to accommodate users with around 20/80 vision, aim for a contrast ratio of at least 7:1.
7. Does your email avoid flashing and flickering content?
Relevant EAA accessibility principle
Operability
How does avoiding flashing and flickering email content help with accessibility?
Flashing and flickering content, like animated GIFs that flash in many colors, can trigger seizures in people susceptible to them.
In 1997, for example, close to 700 children were hospitalized when they suffered photosensitive epileptic seizures after viewing rapidly flashing red and blue lights in a Pokémon television episode.
No, I won’t show a clip of that scene here 😬 But the bottom line is, you don’t want your recipients to have seizures when reading your emails.
What to use instead of flashing and flickering email content
The WCAG doesn’t say you can’t use flashing and flickering email content at all. Rather, it generally discourages including content that flashes more than three times in one second.
But since counting how often your content flashes in a second can be a chore, it’s easier to not use flashing and flickering content in your emails in the first place.
Stick to static images — you can get free ones for personal and commercial use on stock image websites like Unsplash.
Plus, static images tend to have smaller file sizes than animated ones, which helps prevent email clipping.
8. Do your video embeds have subtitles?
Relevant EAA accessibility principle
Perceivability
How do video subtitles help with accessibility?
Video subtitles, or captions, are the text that appear in videos to provide a written version of the video’s audio. Just like this subtitle at the bottom of our video on how to do email marketing for free:
Videos that your emails link out to should have subtitles. This helps users follow the video even if they:
- Can’t hear its audio (because they have a hearing impairment, for example), or if they
- Don’t want to turn on the video’s sound.
How to check if your video embeds have subtitles
To check if the video you want to embed has subtitles, play it.
The video’s creator might have embedded subtitles directly in the video, like what we did for our TikTok video on creating professional email signatures:
Otherwise, try using the video platform’s subtitles setting to turn on subtitles. Check out how to turn on subtitles in YouTube videos, for instance.
Also, if you’re embedding your own video, be sure to add subtitles to it if you haven’t already!
Although the video platform may auto-generate subtitles, they may not be accurate. Here’s a guide to adding subtitles to YouTube videos.
9. Is your email compatible with mobile devices?
Relevant EAA accessibility principle
Robustness
How does mobile compatibility help with accessibility?
Check that your emails are compatible with mobile devices. In other words, they should be easy to read and navigate even on the smaller (and vertical) screen.
Let’s use this email from Waymo as an example. It looks like this on desktop:
And it looks like this on mobile:
The desktop version of the email’s “Exit safely” section features an image on the left and text on the right. But in the mobile version, the image appears stacked on top of the text due to the limited horizontal space.
With around 43.5% of all emails being opened on mobile devices, ensuring that your emails display well on mobile is the way to go. You’ll lose a lot of users otherwise.
How to make your email mobile-compatible
Most good email platforms — like these email marketing services we recommend — develop their email builders with mobile compatibility in mind.
So, when you design your emails for desktop devices on one of these platforms, it will automatically create a mobile version of the same design. (In more technical terms, this is called “responsive design.”)
For example, here’s the desktop version of one of Mailchimp’s email templates:
And this is how the same email template looks on mobile:
The email platform should also let you preview your email on both desktop and mobile before you send it.
Here are more tips for improving mobile compatibility when designing emails:
- Keep your paragraphs short. Otherwise, your content may look like long chunks of text on mobile, and be unappealing to read.
- Make links easy to click on mobile. Design important links (like call-to-action links) as wide buttons that users can easily tap with their thumbs.
- Add image alt text. Some users may disable email images on mobile to save data. Pairing your images with alt text helps these users understand your images’ contents nevertheless.
10. Have you put up an accessibility notice?
Relevant EAA accessibility principle
All of them
How does putting up an accessibility notice help with accessibility?
You’ve made your emails accessible, but you aren’t done yet!
The EAA requires EU-based businesses to put up a written and oral notice explaining how their emails meet the accessibility requirements.
When users read the notice, they’ll know the business’s emails are accessible. They can also get guidance on accessing the emails if they need it.
How to prepare an accessibility notice
Your accessibility notice should include information like:
- The formats users can access your emails in
- How users can operate your emails
- How your emails meet the EAA’s accessibility requirements
This notice should also be publicly available for as long as you send marketing emails. You could publish the notice on a webpage, and then link to the page in your emails’ footers, for example.
If you need help writing your accessibility notice, try the W3C’s accessibility statement tool.
Provide the tool with details, like the accessibility standard you’re following (e.g., level AA) and your conformance status. It’ll then create an accessibility notice you can edit.
Email Accessibility: Final Tips
After preparing your emails, don’t forget to test their accessibility. For example, you could:
- Preview your emails on different devices, like a mobile phone or screen reader.
- Show test versions of your emails to loved ones, friends, and co-workers, and ask if they have trouble interacting with your emails.
Also, the EAA doesn’t just apply to emails. It also applies to other products and services, like websites and ecommerce services. If you run these, you’ll need to make them accessible, too.
What’s more, the EAA’s accessibility requirements are just the minimum standards for EU-based businesses. EU member countries can set stricter rules if they want to! Check your country’s specific accessibility requirements to ensure you’re compliant.
Last but not least: accessibility requirements can change over time. For example, while the WCAG’s latest version is version 2.2, version 3.0 is already in the works. Keep an eye out for changes, so you can adjust your accessibility processes to match.
We’ll share updates on accessibility requirements as soon as we learn about them. Be sure to follow our blog for the latest news!
Got questions on email accessibility in the meantime? Drop ‘em in the comments below.
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This article has been written and researched following our EmailTooltester methodology.
Our Methodology