Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day!

It’s always good to remind ourselves about where we’re at in the accessibility space, and it’s good to remain aware of what’s happening in the wider accessibility space. According to the website accessibility.day, 98.1% of website homepages have at least one WCAG 2.0 failure. That’s so wild to me! I always assumed that web developers would have an easier time hitting accessibility measures than email developers, but I guess not!

So, how did email marketers do this year? Any better than the web devs? Worse?

Sad to say…we’re still a little worse.

My friends over at Email Markup Consortium tested over 400,000 emails and still found we’re severely lacking in the accessibility realm.

Want more information? Email Markup Consortium released its 2025 Accessibility Report today.

What’s causing this disconnect?

I think it’s a combination of education, job duties, and technology.

I feel like I’m always in a bubble when I talk about email accessibility, and I think there are always more people to bring into the space! So if you’re someone who cares deeply about email accessibility, please keep talking about it! The more people we can bring to the table, the better.

One of the biggest hurdles I see to accessible emails is throwing email design onto the shoulder of designers. In my perfect world, we’d have a nice collaboration between designers crafting lovely design systems and email marketers and/or email developers creating emails with well thought-out fonts, colors, and imagery. What we often find instead is email duties thrown onto the shoulders of overburdened designers or exploitative agencies who want pretty Figma designs, completely leaving out those who may have trouble reading the emails in the name of “brand”. There’s a middle ground here that I think is possible to find, we just need the will to find it.

The last piece of the puzzle, in my opinion, are ESPs complete lack of knowledge around best accessibility practices. Since we know a lot of email marketers are using visual editors, it’s up to the ESPs to craft accessible code, which on a whole is sorely lacking. I wish I had an answer to solving this problem. I feel like it would take a pretty big lawsuit against a major ESP to get anyone to make a move, and yet I can see a lot of obstacles to something like that happening since the emails themselves are created and sent by businesses.

If you work at an ESP, please start talking to whoever you can in your business about helping customers make accessible emails. You and your customers will win in the end!

If you would like more resources about accessibility, I’ve compiled a list of talks I’ve done, and some other industry resources.

Times I’ve talked about accessibility

• Email’s Not Dead: Prepping for EAA

• Email Camp: Fostering diversity and inclusion in the email development universe

• Email Einstein: Email Accessibility

• UNSPAM: Accessibility in Practice

Other Email Accessibility Resources

• Email Markup Consortium

• a11y.email by Sarah Gallardo

• A Complete Guide for More Inclusive and Effective Campaigns by Email on Acid

Hope this is helpful. As always, I love hearing from folks and I live and die by getting replies to this newsletter because Open Rates Are Dead.

Chat Soon,
Megan