A significant share of your subscribers read email differently from how you do. Some use screen readers, some magnify the screen, some navigate by keyboard, and many more simply read on small phones in bright sunlight or with tired eyes. An inaccessible email does not just inconvenience these readers; it excludes them entirely, and it can also break for everyone else when images fail to load or colours wash out. Accessibility in email is not a specialist extra. It is a set of practical habits — clear structure, readable text, real contrast, meaningful links, and images that work without being seen — that make every email better for every reader. This guide covers those habits, step by step.
Structure Your Email So Assistive Technology Can Follow It
Screen readers do not see your email the way you do. They read it as a structured document, moving from heading to heading and from link to link. If your email has no real structure, that navigation fails. Use real heading tags in your HTML email: a logical order, with sections marked as headings rather than just bold, larger text. Bold text may look like a heading to a sighted reader, but a screen reader treats it as ordinary text, so the reader cannot jump to it. Keep the reading order logical: the content should make sense when read top to bottom, without relying on side-by-side columns that a screen reader may read in the wrong order. Single-column layouts are the safest choice for accessibility, and they also render better on phones, which is a useful bonus. Use real lists for lists, real paragraphs for paragraphs, and tables only for tabular data, not for layout tricks, because layout tables can confuse screen readers. If your email tool builds emails from blocks, check what HTML it produces: many tools generate proper headings and structure automatically, but some produce a flat stream of styled text that is hard to navigate. A quick check with a screen reader or an accessibility checker before you send will catch the worst problems.
Make Text Readable: Size, Contrast, and Plain Language
Text is the core of every email, and small choices decide whether it can be read. Use a body font size of at least 16 pixels: smaller text is hard to read on phones and for readers with low vision, and it cannot be enlarged easily in every email client. Use a line height of around 1.5 times the font size, so lines do not crowd together, and keep paragraphs short, with a clear break between them. Contrast matters as much as size. Light grey text on a white background may look elegant, but it can be unreadable for many readers; dark text on a light background is the safest combination, and your colour choices should meet the widely used contrast standard of at least 4.5 to 1 for normal text. Avoid putting important text over images or patterned backgrounds, where contrast varies across the image and cannot be guaranteed. Plain language helps too: short sentences, everyday words, and a clear point per paragraph make your email easier for everyone, including readers using translation tools or reading in a second language. Readability is not dumbing down; it is respecting the reader’s time and attention. The same clarity improves your email design generally, as our guide to email design best practices explains.
Images: Alt Text, and Never Text Trapped Inside an Image
Images fail often in email: they are blocked by default in some clients, they fail to load on slow connections, and they are invisible to screen readers. Every meaningful image therefore needs alt text: a short description of what the image shows and why it matters, written as a sentence, not a file name. A product image might have alt text like “Blue ceramic coffee mug with a white handle, shown on a wooden table.” A decorative image, such as a divider or a background flourish, should have empty alt text, so screen readers skip it instead of announcing a meaningless file name. The bigger trap is text inside images: headlines, prices, discount codes, or calls to action rendered as part of a picture. When that image does not load, the information is gone, and a screen reader cannot read it at all. Keep all important text as real, selectable text in the email body, and use images to support the message, not to carry it. If your design team produces a beautiful image containing the headline, ask for the headline as real text and the image as decoration. Your email will still look good, and it will work for every reader, with or without images.
Links and Buttons: Say Where They Go
“Click here” is the classic accessibility failure in email. A screen reader user often navigates by pulling up a list of all the links in a message, and a list full of “click here” and “read more” links tells them nothing about where each link goes. Write link text that describes the destination: “Download the email accessibility checklist” or “Read our guide to email segmentation” instead of “click here.” The same applies to buttons: the button text should state the action, such as “Start your free trial” or “View the full report.” Make links and buttons large enough to tap easily on a phone — a small, tightly packed row of links is hard for anyone with limited motor control, and frustrating for everyone else on a small screen. Leave clear space around each link, and do not rely on colour alone to identify a link: underline links or otherwise distinguish them, because readers with colour vision differences may not see a colour-only distinction. When you link to other content, choose natural anchor text that fits the sentence, as in our guide to email segmentation for beginners, so the link makes sense both in context and on its own.
Colour, Motion, and Keyboard Navigation
Colour carries meaning in many emails — green for success, red for urgency, a coloured badge for a category — but colour alone is never enough. A reader with colour vision differences may not distinguish the colours you chose, so pair colour with another signal: a word, an icon, or a shape. “Sold out” should say “Sold out,” not just turn grey; an urgent notice should say “Urgent” in text, not just appear in red. Motion needs the same care. Animated images and flashing content can trigger discomfort or seizures for some readers, and they distract everyone else. If you use animation, keep it subtle, avoid flashing more than a few times per second, and never make animation the only way to convey information. Keyboard navigation matters too: some readers navigate email without a mouse, using the keyboard alone. Links and buttons should be reachable in a logical order, and the focus indicator — the outline that shows which element is selected — should remain visible rather than being removed for cosmetic reasons. Most of these fixes cost nothing at design time and are expensive to retrofit, so build them into your email templates from the start.
Test Accessibility Before You Send
Accessibility testing for email is simpler than most people expect, and it catches problems that affect all readers, not just those using assistive technology. Start with the cheapest checks: turn images off and read the email — does it still make sense? Zoom the email to twice its size — does the layout hold together? Check the contrast of your text colours with a free contrast checker. Read the email with a screen reader, even briefly, or use your email tool’s accessibility checker if it has one. Send a test to yourself and open it on a phone, in a dark-mode inbox, and in a client that blocks images, because each of these reveals a different failure. Pay attention to dark mode in particular: email clients that invert colours can turn your carefully chosen text unreadable, so test your template in dark mode and adjust background and text colours where needed. Fix the problems you find in the template, not just in one email, so every future send benefits. A short pre-send checklist — headings, alt text, contrast, link text, images off, dark mode — takes a few minutes and prevents the most common exclusions. For the wider testing habit, our guide to A/B testing emails shows how to build testing into your sending routine.
Mistakes That Make Emails Inaccessible
The most common mistake is the image-only email: a single large image containing the whole message, which is blank when images are blocked and silent to a screen reader. The second is tiny, low-contrast text chosen for looks rather than legibility. The third is vague link text — “click here” repeated through the email. The fourth is colour-only meaning, such as a red-versus-green status with no words. The fifth is a complex multi-column layout that reads in the wrong order. The sixth is missing alt text, or alt text that is just a file name like “IMG_4821.jpg.” And the seventh is never testing: sending from a template that nobody has checked with images off or in dark mode. None of these mistakes requires bad intentions; most come from designing for one ideal reader on one ideal screen. Your subscribers are not one ideal reader. Design for the range of real readers, and your emails will be more robust for all of them, including the reader on a cracked phone screen in bright sun.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to rebuild my templates to make emails accessible?
Usually not from scratch. Most accessibility fixes — real headings, larger text, better contrast, meaningful alt text, descriptive links — can be applied to an existing template in one editing pass. The expensive part is not the fix; it is discovering the problems, which is why a pre-send checklist matters.
Does accessible email design hurt how my emails look?
No. Accessible emails tend to look cleaner: a single column, readable text, clear buttons, and real text instead of images. Good design and accessibility usually point in the same direction. The trade-off is rarely between beauty and accessibility; it is between a design that only works in ideal conditions and one that works everywhere.
How do I write good alt text?
Describe what the image shows and why it is there, in one short sentence. If the image is a product, describe the product. If it is a chart, summarise the key point. If it is purely decorative, use empty alt text so screen readers skip it. Skip phrases like “image of” — the screen reader already announces that it is an image.
Conclusion
Email accessibility is not a separate project; it is how you write good emails. Structure them so assistive technology can navigate, use readable text with real contrast, give every image meaningful alt text, write links that say where they go, never rely on colour alone, and test with images off and in dark mode before you send. These habits take little extra time once they are in your template and checklist, and they open your emails to readers who would otherwise be shut out. Every subscriber deserves an email they can actually read. Build for all of them, and your emails will work better for everyone.