Accessibility in Email: Making it real

A personal mission

Beyond the Envelope™
4 min readMay 7, 2021

It’s almost six years since I took the stage at The Email Design Conference, 2015, in London, and challenged the email marketing industry to implement ‘A Type of Accessibility’ into their email campaigns — at a time when accessibility in email was talked about, but not implemented.

‘A Type of Accessibility’. My talk at The Email Design Conference, 2015.
‘A Type of Accessibility’. My talk at The Email Design Conference, 2015.

It’s been exciting to see, how since that day, the industry has embraced accessibility, with organisations like Litmus and Email on Acid, and individuals like Mark Robbins and Elliot Ross, contributing to the conversation and making a difference.

A type of accessibility

What I covered in that first talk in 2015 is still relevant today. Along with other insights we’ve made as an industry, they remain the go-to implementations for accessibility in email. A logical code order. Live text, text alignment, text size (font-size) and text spacing (line-height). Colour use, colour contrast and ‘blue links’. Alternative text, alt attributes and semantic elements (using margin:0; to control spacing). Plain text versions and testing using tools like WebAIMs WAVE web accessibility evaluation tool. These…

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Beyond the Envelope™

Paul Airy – follower of Jesus, husband, father, Email Designer & Developer and Accessibility & Usability Consultant, with a fondness for typography. #EmailGeek