Email accessibility: how to make your emails readable for everyone

One in four adults in the US and EU has a disability. Globally, it's one in six, and Litmus reports that 2.2 billion people live with some form of vision impairment. Now look at your last campaign — the light-gray text, the offer buried inside an image, the "click here" link with no context. For a huge slice of your audience, that email was unreadable.

That's not a niche edge case. It's a quarter of the people you're paying to reach. And here's the part most small senders miss: the same group controls roughly $1 trillion in annual disposable income, according to Litmus. Accessible email isn't charity. It's reaching customers you're currently leaving on the table.

The best part — and the reason this is worth your afternoon — is that accessible design helps everyone. Bigger text, stronger contrast, clearer copy. Those don't just serve people with disabilities. They make your emails easier to read on a cracked phone screen in bright sunlight, which is most of your list anyway.

Accessible design is just good design

Mailchimp frames it through universal design — the idea that building for the edges improves the experience for everyone in the middle. A 14-pixel minimum font size helps a low-vision reader and the person squinting at their phone on a train. High contrast helps someone with color blindness and anyone reading outdoors.

Litmus organizes the whole thing into four POUR principles, drawn from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines:

Perceivable — people can actually take in the content, by sight, sound, or assistive tech
Operable — they can navigate and interact, including by keyboard alone
Understandable — the language and layout are clear
Robust — it works across email clients and screen readers

You don't need to memorize the framework. You need to know that when you make an email work for a screen reader, you've usually made it work better for everyone — including the reader who, per Litmus, gives your email an average of 8.97 seconds before deciding to stay or bin it.

Contrast, text size, and the visual basics

Most accessibility wins are visual, and they're easy to get right once you know the numbers.

Start with contrast. Mailchimp's standard — pulled straight from WCAG — is a 4.5:1 contrast ratio for normal text and 3:1 for large text. That trendy light-gray-on-white look fails this badly. Run your colors through a free tool like the WebAIM contrast checker before you ship, as Litmus recommends, and you'll catch most problems in seconds.

A few more visual rules worth locking in:

Body text at 14 pixels minimum (Mailchimp), with line spacing around 1.5x the font size so paragraphs breathe (Litmus)
Never rely on color alone to carry meaning — Litmus notes that 8% of men have some form of color blindness, so a red "out of stock" tag means nothing without a label
Skip justified alignment; the uneven word spacing it creates is genuinely hard to read (Litmus)
Avoid condensed or decorative typefaces for body copy — save the personality for short headings

And the GIF you were about to add? Mailchimp caps safe animation at three flashes per second. Anything faster can trigger seizures. That's not a style preference — it's a safety line you don't cross.

Structure your email so screen readers can follow it

A screen reader doesn't see your layout. It reads your code, top to bottom, out loud. So the way you structure an email decides whether a blind subscriber gets a coherent message or a jumbled mess.

Both Mailchimp and Litmus push the same foundation here. Use real semantic HTML — proper heading tags in order (H1, then H2, then H3) — so screen reader users can jump between sections the way a sighted reader skims. And keep your layout to a single column. Multi-column designs read in a confusing order out loud, and they collapse badly on mobile anyway.

Two more technical pieces matter, and they're easy to hand to whatever builds your email:

Add role="presentation" to layout tables so assistive tech ignores the design scaffolding and reads only the content, as Litmus advises
Set the lang attribute on your email — a missing language tag makes a screen reader mispronounce everything, which Litmus flags as a common and avoidable break

Wherever you can, use live HTML text instead of text baked into an image. Litmus makes the case plainly: real text is readable by screen readers, resizable, and it adapts to dark mode. An image of text does none of that.

Write copy everyone can actually read

Accessibility isn't only visual. The words themselves can shut people out — readers with cognitive disabilities, non-native speakers, anyone scanning fast on a small screen.

Litmus offers concrete targets here, and they're refreshingly specific. Aim for a Flesch Reading Ease score of 60 to 70 — readable by a wide audience, not just specialists. Keep sentences under 20 words. And treat 36 words as the sweet spot for an email's core message. You can check your score with a free tool like Readable.io.

The tactics that get you there:

Write in active voice. "We shipped your order" beats "Your order has been shipped" — it's shorter and lands faster (Litmus).
Use plain, simple vocabulary and define any term that isn't obvious
Build a strong visual hierarchy with headings and white space so readers can scan, not slog (Litmus)
Break dense paragraphs apart — a wall of text is a barrier for everyone, especially readers using assistive tech

Then there's alt text — the single highest-impact habit for accessible email. Every meaningful image needs a short description of what it shows and why it's there. Mailchimp's guidance: keep it under 150 characters and make it descriptive. If your offer lives inside an image and the alt text is blank, a screen reader user gets silence where your headline should be.

Make your links and buttons say what they do

"Click here" is useless to a screen reader user, who often pulls up a list of every link in an email to navigate. A screenful of "click here" tells them nothing. Mailchimp and Litmus both call for descriptive link text — "Read the full pricing guide" instead of "click here."

Buttons need room, too. Mailchimp's minimum touch target is 44×44 pixels, with enough spacing around each one that a reader with limited motor control — or anyone with big thumbs — doesn't fat-finger the wrong link.

The mistakes that quietly lock people out

A handful of pitfalls show up over and over in the research. Worth a quick scan before you hit send:

Putting your key message — the offer, the deadline, the headline — inside an image only (Mailchimp)
All-caps text beyond a short heading; screen readers may read it letter by letter, and it's tiring to scan (Mailchimp)
Complex multi-column layouts that scramble the reading order (Mailchimp)
Relying on color alone to signal meaning (Litmus)
Fast-flashing GIFs above the three-per-second line (Litmus)
Justified text and condensed fonts that hurt legibility (Litmus)
A missing lang attribute that breaks screen reader pronunciation (Litmus)
Never testing across email clients — what renders fine in Gmail can fall apart elsewhere (Mailchimp)

One thing to know on the legal side: WCAG isn't just a nicety. Litmus points to the ADA in the US, the UK's Equality Act, and the European Accessibility Act as standards that increasingly apply to digital communication. Level AA conformance is the accepted target for most senders.

Build it into your workflow, not your wish list

The reason accessibility gets skipped isn't disagreement — it's that it always feels like extra work at the worst moment, right before a send. Mailchimp's fix is the right one: bake it into your standard process so it stops being a separate task.

A short pre-send checklist does most of the work:

Contrast checked, text at 14px or larger
Every meaningful image has alt text under 150 characters
Headings in order, single column, links described
Tested with a keyboard and, ideally, a free screen reader like NVDA

Automated checkers help, too — Litmus notes they can catch 40-plus common issues before a human ever looks. They won't replace real testing, but they'll clear the easy stuff fast.

This matters more every year, not less. Email isn't fading — Litmus projects 4.89 billion email users by 2027, and the channel still returns about $36 for every dollar spent. Accessible email simply means more of those people can read what you send. AI-assisted tools make it easier, but they don't make it automatic; a generated email still needs your check on contrast, alt text, and plain language.

Final thoughts

Accessible email isn't a separate project you'll get to someday. It's a set of small, specific habits — readable text, real contrast, alt text, plain language, descriptive links — that happen to make your emails better for your entire list.

Start with one campaign. Check the contrast, write the alt text, cut the jargon. You'll reach a quarter of your audience you were quietly missing — and the other three-quarters will find your emails easier to read, too. If you'd rather build campaigns with accessibility baked in from the first draft, join the Doxiefy waitlist and see how AI-assisted outreach can help you write for everyone.