Marketing email is the accessibility gap most businesses have never looked at, and it is a straightforward one: the templates are few, they change rarely, and the fixes are the same handful of rules repeated. This page is the checklist, in the order an email is read. It is not a legal duty in the way the website is, and it is the same audience: somebody who cannot read your email cannot become the customer who could not use your site either.
Structure, because an email is a document
Use real headings rather than bold text, keep a single-column layout, put the important content in text rather than in an image, and give the email a language attribute and a descriptive subject. Screen readers navigate email by heading exactly as they navigate a page, and a wall of images with one alt attribute is silence.
Images, alt text and the image-off case
Many clients block images by default, so the email has to work without them. Every meaningful image needs alt text, decorative ones need empty alt, and no email should depend on an image of text to communicate its offer. Test by turning images off in your own client: if the email says nothing, neither does it for a screen reader.
Links, contrast and buttons
Link text that means something out of context (not click here), a contrast ratio that meets the same 4.5:1 as the site, and buttons that are real links styled as buttons rather than images. Then send yourself a test and read it with a screen reader on a phone, which takes two minutes and is the whole audit for most templates.
Questions people ask about email accessibility guidelines
Is email covered by the ADA?
The duty aims at the site; the audience is the same, and an unreadable email costs you the customer before the site is reached.
How many templates do we have to fix?
Usually three or four: newsletter, transactional, receipt and one campaign layout. Fix the templates and every send inherits it.
Do dark-mode clients change anything?
Yes: check contrast in both, because many clients invert colours and a logo on a transparent background can disappear.