Your email accessibility checklist

Your emails are reaching inboxes. 

But for a chunk of your supporters, they could be unreadable: people using screen readers, supporters with low vision, or anyone with images turned off. 

This isn’t a niche problem. These people are on your list right now.

What the data says
The Email Markup Consortium’s 2025 Accessibility Report analyzed over 443,000 emails. 

Only 21 (!!!) emails passed all automated accessibility checks. They came from just two brands.

The most common failures were basic.

51% of emails lacked alt text describing the image, 59% failed color contrast checks, and 72% had links with no readable text.

When the EMC looked at education and government domains, where accessibility is often legally required, 100% of the education emails still failed.

These are automated checks, so they can catch whether alt text exists but not whether it actually describes the image. 

The real picture is probably worse, but it doesn’t have to be.

Your email accessibility checklist
When embarking on an email template redesign or testing your email before it drops, here’s what to consider:

☐ Write real alt text for every image. “Header image” doesn’t count. Describe what the image shows or what it’s meant to communicate. 

If your image conveys the message, the alt text needs to convey it too.

☐ Check your color contrast. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) require at least a 4.5:1 contrast ratio between text and background. 

Light gray on white? Probably fails. WebAIM’s free Contrast Checker takes 30 seconds.

☐ Set body text to at least 14–16px. Anything smaller becomes a barrier for supporters with low vision and makes your emails harder to read on mobile for everyone.

☐ Skip the all caps. All-caps text is harder to read for people with dyslexia and other cognitive disabilities, and some screen readers interpret it as shouting or read it letter by letter.

☐ Left-align your body text. Center-aligned text is fine for short headlines, but center-aligning full paragraphs creates uneven spacing that makes reading harder, especially for people with cognitive or learning disabilities.

☐ Don’t rely on color alone to convey meaning. “Click the green button” means nothing to someone with color blindness. 

Make sure your calls to action work without color as a signal.

☐ Write descriptive link text. Screen readers can pull up a list of every link in an email. “Click here” repeated five times is useless. “Donate to protect Arctic wildlife” isn’t.

☐ Review your plain text version. Most platforms auto-generate one, and most auto-generated versions are garbled. Read it before you send it.

☐ Test across email clients and devices. A single Gmail test send isn’t enough. Tools like Litmus and Email on Acid let you preview across dozens of clients and flag dark mode rendering issues.

☐ Check reading order on mobile. Emails that show content side by side on desktop often stack in an unexpected order on phones. 

Read through your email on a mobile device before you send it to make sure the flow still makes sense.

The bottom line
Most of these fixes take minutes, not days. 

Work this list into your standard QA process, and accessibility stops being a separate project. 

Check our events list for more or reply to this email to submit one for consideration.

‘Til next time!
Sara