Test email HTML for screen reader compatibility, alt tags, color contrast, heading structure, and link text quality.
Paste email HTML and click "Run accessibility check" to see results.
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Over 1 billion people worldwide live with some form of disability. Inaccessible emails exclude a significant portion of your audience, leading to lost engagement and revenue. Beyond the business case, many countries have legal requirements for digital accessibility. Making emails accessible also improves the experience for everyone, including people using voice assistants, reading in bright sunlight, or on slow connections.
The most common issues include: missing alt text on images (screen readers cannot describe them), poor color contrast between text and background (hard to read for low-vision users), generic link text like "click here" (meaningless out of context for screen reader users who navigate by links), skipped heading levels (breaks document structure for assistive technology), and missing language attribute (screen readers may mispronounce content).
WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) is the international standard for digital accessibility, published by the W3C. While WCAG was designed for websites, its principles apply directly to HTML emails. Key requirements include a minimum 4.5:1 contrast ratio for normal text, meaningful alt text for images, proper heading hierarchy, and descriptive link text. Most accessibility laws reference WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the compliance standard.
Screen readers like NVDA, JAWS, and VoiceOver parse HTML emails similarly to web pages. They read content linearly, announce images using alt text, navigate via headings and links, and interpret table structures. However, email clients often strip or modify HTML, which can break accessibility features. Using semantic HTML, role="presentation" on layout tables, proper heading hierarchy, and descriptive link text ensures the best screen reader experience across all email clients.
It depends on who you are and where you operate, but the exposure is real. In the US, courts have applied the ADA to digital communications and Section 508 requires accessible email from federal agencies and their contractors. The EU's European Accessibility Act took effect in June 2025 for a broad range of consumer-facing businesses, and many countries reference WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the compliance bar. Marketing and transactional email sent to the public is increasingly treated the same as a website for accessibility purposes, so the safe assumption is that it's in scope.
Describe the image's purpose, not just its contents. For a product photo, "Blue running shoe, side view" beats "image1.jpg"; for a button image, describe the action ("Shop the sale") rather than the graphic. Leave alt text empty (alt="") for purely decorative images and spacers so screen readers skip them instead of announcing noise. Never bury important text inside an image with no alt fallback — when images are blocked (Outlook's default) or unread aloud, that content simply vanishes.
Yes, and it's an easy way to fail contrast for a large slice of readers. Many clients (Apple Mail, Outlook, Gmail) auto-invert or recolor emails in dark mode, which can turn a compliant 4.5:1 combination into unreadable low-contrast text — dark text on a background that also went dark, for instance. Test your template in both light and dark mode, avoid pure-black text on pure-white (use near-black like #111), and give logos a transparent or dark-mode-safe version so they don't disappear.
The score weighs each issue by how much it actually blocks a reader with assistive technology. Missing alt text and failing color contrast carry the most weight because they hard-block screen-reader and low-vision users; generic link text and skipped headings weigh less because they degrade the experience without fully blocking it. A high score means no critical blockers were found — it isn't a legal certification, but it's a strong signal your email is usable by assistive tech.
Errors are WCAG failures that will exclude some readers — images with no alt attribute, text below the 4.5:1 contrast ratio, or a missing language attribute. Fix these first. Warnings are best-practice gaps that hurt clarity without fully breaking access, like "click here" link text or a jump from an <h1> straight to an <h3>. Clearing warnings is what moves a "usable" email to a genuinely good one.
It statically analyzes your HTML — alt attributes, contrast ratios, heading order, link text quality, and the language attribute — which covers the most common and most damaging failures. What it can't do is judge whether your alt text is meaningful or whether reading order makes sense in a specific client, since those need human judgment. Use the tool to eliminate the objective failures, then send a real test to yourself and tab through it (or turn on VoiceOver) to catch the rest.
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