Email Accessibility: How to Make Your Campaigns Work for Everyone

The W3C defines web accessibility as designing tools and technologies so that people with disabilities can use them. In practical terms for email marketing, it means that someone using a screen reader, someone with color blindness, someone with a cognitive impairment, or someone with low vision should be able to read and understand your email as well as anyone else.

In the UK, around 26% of American adults live with some form of disability, according to the CDC. Roughly 80% of those disabilities are not visible. This means you cannot know, by looking at your subscriber list, who needs accessible design and who does not. The reasonable assumption is that every list of meaningful size includes a significant proportion of people for whom accessibility genuinely matters.

The business case and the ethical case point in the same direction: accessible emails reach more people, perform better for all subscribers because good accessibility practice is also good design practice, and demonstrate that your brand considers the full range of people it communicates with.

Use fonts and structure that aid reading

Sans-serif fonts (Arial, Calibri, Helvetica) are easier to read than serif fonts for most people, particularly those with dyslexia. Decorative or script fonts should never be used for body copy, regardless of how good they look in your brand guidelines. Keep your body text at a minimum of 14px, and set your line spacing to at least 1.5 times the font size. These are not accessibility-only considerations: they improve readability for everyone.

Use heading tags (h1, h2, h3) to create a logical document structure rather than styling normal paragraphs to look like headings with bold text and a larger font. Screen readers use heading hierarchy to help users navigate an email. A properly structured email is also easier to understand visually, because it signals the relationship between sections.

Left-align your body text

Centerd text is harder to read than left-aligned text for most people, and significantly harder for those with dyslexia. Centerd text creates irregular line lengths and uneven left-side anchoring, which disrupts the natural reading flow. The convention of centring everything in marketing emails exists for aesthetic reasons, but the WCAG guidelines are clear that left-alignment is better for readability. Keep centring to short headlines and CTAs if you use it at all.

Check your color contrast

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1) set a minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1 between text and background for normal-sized text, and 3:1 for large text. This is not an abstract guideline. Insufficient contrast is one of the most common accessibility failures in email, and it directly affects how readable your email is for subscribers with low vision or color blindness.

Checking your contrast is easy. WebAIM's Contrast Checker (webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker) lets you enter your foreground and background color values and tells you immediately whether you meet the standard. Light grey text on a white background, which is common in email footers, almost universally fails this check.

Write meaningful ALT text for every image

ALT text serves two purposes: it displays when images are blocked by an email client, and it is read aloud by screen readers to describe images to users who cannot see them. Both situations are common. Many corporate email environments block images by default. Screen reader users rely on ALT text to understand the content and context of images they cannot see.

Good ALT text describes what the image shows and, where relevant, what function it serves. For a product image: "Blue ceramic coffee mug with white handle". For a CTA button rendered as an image: "Download the free guide". For a purely decorative image with no informational content: use an empty alt attribute (alt="") so the screen reader skips it rather than announcing that there is an image with no description.

Use semantic HTML correctly

Semantic HTML uses the right element for each piece of content: paragraph tags for paragraphs, list tags for lists, link tags with descriptive anchor text rather than bare URLs or generic "click here" labels. This matters for screen readers, which interpret semantic structure to present content in a logical way, and it also improves rendering consistency across email clients.

Avoid using tables for visual layout rather than tabular data. While tables remain common in email HTML for structural reasons due to limited CSS support in some clients, they should be used as sparingly as possible and never nested in ways that create confusing reading orders for screen readers. Include a lang attribute at the document level to specify the language of your email, which helps screen readers use the correct pronunciation rules.

Accessible design is not a separate checklist to work through after the real design work is done. It is a set of principles that, when applied from the start, produce emails that are more readable, better structured, and more likely to communicate effectively with every subscriber. For more on email design fundamentals: 101 email marketing tips.