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Email Accessibility
Email accessibility is the practice of designing and coding emails so that every subscriber can perceive, navigate, and act on them, including people using screen readers, people with low vision or color blindness, and people relying on keyboard navigation. It's often treated as an afterthought, but accessibility touches the same decisions that shape good email design generally: layout, color choices, and responsive structure. Building accessibly from the start is far easier than retrofitting it later, and it tends to improve the email for every subscriber, not just those with disabilities.
Alt Text for Images
Alt text (alternative text) is a short description attached to an image in the HTML that's read aloud by screen readers and displayed if the image fails to load or is blocked. Since many email clients block images by default until a subscriber explicitly allows them, alt text isn't a niche accessibility feature: it affects how a large share of opens experience the email in its first few seconds. Good alt text:
- Describes what the image shows or communicates, not just "image" or the filename.
- Is left empty (
alt="") for purely decorative images that add no information, so screen readers skip over them instead of reading out noise. - Is written concisely: a sentence or short phrase is usually enough, not a paragraph.
A logo might use alt text like "Company Name logo," while a product photo should describe the product, not just say "photo."
Sufficient Color Contrast
Subscribers with low vision or color blindness can struggle to read text that doesn't have enough contrast against its background. This is the same concern covered in visual branding and color, but from an accessibility angle it becomes a hard requirement rather than a stylistic preference:
- Avoid low-contrast pairings like light gray on white, or colored text on a similarly colored background.
- Don't use color as the only way to convey information, for example marking a required field red without also labeling it, since colorblind readers may not perceive the distinction.
- Test important text and buttons specifically for contrast rather than judging by eye on a calibrated monitor, which tends to make everything look more legible than it actually is.
Avoiding Text-in-Image-Only Designs
A design pattern that looks polished but badly hurts accessibility is putting all of an email's actual message inside a single image, with no live text version of that content anywhere in the HTML. Screen readers cannot read text baked into an image, so a subscriber relying on one hears nothing but whatever alt text was provided, if any was provided at all. This pattern also:
- Fails completely for subscribers with images blocked, leaving a blank email.
- Can't be selected, copy-pasted, translated, or resized by the reader.
- Tends to get flagged by spam filters, since an email that's "all image, no text" is a known spam signal.
The fix is straightforward: keep the actual message (headline, body copy, CTA) as live HTML text, and use images only to support or decorate that message, not to replace it.
Logical Heading Structure
Screen reader users often navigate an email by jumping between headings rather than reading top to bottom, similar to how a sighted reader scans a page. That only works if headings are marked up in a real, logical hierarchy (an <h1> for the main subject, <h2> for major sections, and so on) rather than achieved purely with bold or larger font sizes that carry no semantic meaning. A clear heading structure also benefits every reader by making the email easier to skim, which matters given how quickly most people decide whether to keep reading.
Link Text That Makes Sense Out of Context
Screen readers can also generate a list of all links on a page in isolation, separate from their surrounding sentence. Link text like "click here" or "read more" is meaningless in that list: the reader has no idea what they'd be clicking through to. Writing descriptive link text fixes this for everyone:
| Weak Link Text | Better Link Text |
|---|---|
| "Click here" | "See this week's sale items" |
| "Read more" | "Read the full product update" |
| "Learn more" | "Learn how the new feature works" |
Descriptive link text also reads better for sighted subscribers skimming an email, and can modestly help with how links are understood by spam filters and email clients.
Accessibility and Deliverability Overlap
Accessible emails tend to perform better on metrics beyond accessibility itself. Live text instead of text-in-image improves how spam filters evaluate a message, alt text and clear structure make an email usable even when images are blocked, and clean semantic HTML is generally easier for email clients to render consistently across devices. In practice, accessibility work and deliverability work reinforce each other: an email built to be accessible reaches, and is understood by, a broader share of the list than one that only "looks right" to a sighted reader with images turned on.