Email for all Webinar Q&A – European Accessibility Act
Jay Oram
Head of Dev
11 Jul 2025
Email for All – Top tips to meet the new accessibility laws
Q&A
I’m a brand based in the UK/US, do these new laws affect us and the communications that we send to our email subscribers?
Although it is titled the 'European Accessibility Act' it covers any European resident, even when travelling. Another really important point is that your subscribers are often online, if you are a brand, you may ship internationally or your content is consumed by someone anywhere in the world and that could mean Europe.
In the webinar Claire, Tom and I mention empathy and talking to your email recipients or customers – the best emails and digital content will put the user first and that includes accessibility.
Full background on the act can be found here: https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/policies/justice-and-fundamental-rights/disability/union-equality-strategy-rights-persons-disabilities-2021-2030/european-accessibility-act_en
How do you approach writing for screen readers or people using assistive tech – are there specific dos and don’ts for email copy?
Claire answered in the webinar:
Writing the content as clearly and simply as possible should be the approach, that will help with screen readers. You should be aware of punctuation – some mirror full stops and some lift at the end of a sentence with a question mark (?), some read out the punctuation, so bear that in mind. Setting language in your content and emails ensures it is read out correctly. Lastly acronyms, VAT, NASA etc. are good examples – biggest takeaway, don't change something just for a screen reader, they are built to work with different text and are getting better and better over time.
Also earlier on in the podcast Claire mentioned the fighting talk blog: https://fightingtalk.substack.com/
How can brands test the accessibility of their emails across devices and platforms – are there tools you recommend?
The Deque university guide to screen readers is a great start: https://dequeuniversity.com/screenreaders/ – then using your email QA tools, such as Litmus or Email on Acid.
Also this guide for use on Macs: https://equalizedigital.com/learn/courses/voiceover-screen-reader-testing-on-mac/
Jay's guide on writing good alt text: https://www.actionrocket.co/blog/how-to-write-alt-text-correctly-with-context
Are animated gifs and live elements still okay to use with the new laws?
Yes with some caveats.
GIFs – ensure they don't flash more than 3 times per second as this can cause some users, possibly those with photosensitive epilepsy to have problems.
A WCAG guideline that is longer than 5 seconds a user should be able to pause the GIF. On web and other platforms we can use javascript or similar to pause a GIF, but this isn't available in email, so you can ensure your GIFs are shorter than 5 seconds or if they are longer create a pause after 5 seconds.
Within the code you could use a few techniques like: hover, click to reveal or the prefers-reduced-motion CSS media query to hide/show GIFs to users – but this is quite technical and not well supported across email clients.
Lastly, be mindful with GIFs and live images – make sure they don't flash too much, videos for example, maybe the experience is better on a video streaming site that has accessibility controls.
What if my ESP doesn't allow for this level of control – I don't know how to make it create an H1 or an alt attribute. Do I need to switch ESP to be compliant then?
As we mentioned in the webinar, if your ESP or email builder does not give access to the code or the ability to control the elements used in the email build, then feeding back to the platform is the first port of call. There are a lot of email builders that have compliant code or allow you to use your own code with a visual editor or drag and drop interface.
Should accessibility become a fixed part of my team's email sign-off process – and if so, who should own that?
All webinar participants agree that there is a joint responsibility to QA and speak up to make sure your emails and content is accessible for all.
Claire mentioned listening to your subscribers and also reaching out to anyone that has fed back about an accessibility issue.
Hi, would you be able to please elaborate on ARIA labels please? We have found that ARIA labels work amazingly for screen readers and buttons. Should we only have ARIA labels or alt text in our images?
As ARIA doesn’t have great support in email, it’s not as effective as when used on the web. Also as I mentioned during the webinar, ARIA is only needed to label something that is not being used for its semantic meaning – links, paragraphs, images and headings make up the majority of an email and all of these have respective elements. If you need an ARIA label or title attribute to add a description to a link, WCAG recommend either re-writing the call to action to be more descriptive or if you need to hide some descriptive text follow the guidelines here: https://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-WCAG20-TECHS-20081103/C7.html
I'd also definitely read Sarah Gallardo's blog on using ARIA in email: https://a11y.email/component-aria
Are there any contrast colour sites that you use? Litmus has one for colour blindness, would that be similar?
If you use Figma to design, there is a built-in colour contrast checker, also in the Dev tools for Chrome. But some really useful sites are:
https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker
Button sizes and text, are there any min requirements you do? I use a 18px or 20px font-size at around 50-60px height?
Technically in WCAG there isn't a minimum font size, however it does set out requirements that fonts should be resizable 1.4.4: resize text and 1.4.12: text spacing – as we mentioned in the webinar, line-height should be atleast 1.5 or one and a half times the size of your font. In email the general best practice is that 14px is the very minimum for text – think terms and conditions or foot notes - 16px should be the minimum for body copy or paragraph text.
Button size is set out in 2.5.8 Target Size (Minimum) – this is for pointers, so someone using a mouse for example and that is 24x24px however in email we try to cater to all mediums, mobile, tablet, desktop and users that may not have fine motor control and in that case the best practice is to meet the Level AAA target size of 44x44px as set out in 2.5.5 Target Size.
Question around the new law: if your email is accessible by design – and a client you have no control over inverts the colour to something that has poor colour contrast, are you still liable to be fined?
Ooh ^^ this one is tricky and a grey area, technically the software (the email client) is ultimately responsible for supporting the latest standards. However there isn’t an accepted standard across email clients - in the past user feedback and having the knowledge that something is not accessible, then continuing to send has been penalised. I’d reiterate what Claire mentioned in the webinar, empathy for your recipients, if the colour is inverting and is unusable, find a colour that works.
Any resources for how to convince management that this is important when you are in the US with US only subscribers so they don’t seem to care?
Similar to the first question but US specific – I would approach this in the same way as GDPR – if you do any business with European or UK customers I would say it was essential to follow the guidelines. In the US there is already a standard that should be adhered to from the American Disabilities Alliance (ADA) which also recommends following the WCAG guidelines.
Convincing management that this is worth it, if they don’t support accessibility is a big task. I think there are two ways you can approach it:
Firstly from a purely monetary perspective, one fine from the EU could set you back more than €100,000 – is it worth risking that fine, when you could fix the elements up front. Another monetary perspective is to use the stats from the CDC (1 in 4 people in the US) and UK (1 in 5 people in the UK) plus globally 16% or 1.3 billion people have accessibility needs and you don't want to exclude between 16 and 25% of your audience.
Secondly from a brand perspective. Dominos was one of the highest profile cases in the US, where they incurred a fine, but more importantly the brand suffered from being labeled as inaccessible – not a great PR move.
Any best practices for colour contrast with respect to Outlook, and other email clients, who do colour inversion while using media queries to change dark-mode colours in clients that use them correctly?
With email clients that support using the prefers-color-scheme media query, you can treat them the same as you would testing with light mode. Unfortunately for the others that automatically invert your colours, you either need to test them, remove colours that do not work or try to work around them.
The best resource I have seen for dark mode ‘hacks’ is this one from Matthieu Solente:
https://github.com/matthieuSolente/email-darkmode
Are there any tools to make sure you have better designs that help with better dark mode designs?
Testing is super important, so a tool like Litmus, Email on Acid, Testi or Inbox Monster – and I'm sure more will help you see what a design looks like. But also search out some great email specific blogs:
https://www.actionrocket.co/blog/how-to-create-a-dark-mode-friendly-email-logo
https://www.actionrocket.co/blog/darkmode-design-considerations
https://www.actionrocket.co/blog/understanding-colors-in-dark-mode
https://www.actionrocket.co/blog/dark-mode-images-common-issues-amp-how-to-avoid-them
https://www.actionrocket.co/blog/winning-at-dark-mode-design
https://www.litmus.com/blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-dark-mode-for-email-marketers