Key takeaways:
- The goal of accessible design is to help everyone enjoy your content.
- There are many ways to make an email accessible including left-justifying your text, using a minimum font size, and more.
- It’s better to take small steps towards accessibility than none at all.
Email design is more than pretty decoration and interesting colors—it’s how people experience and interact with information.
While accessibility in design has always been a good practice, it’ll also be the law when the European Accessibility Act (EAA) goes into effect in June 2025. When we polled the email community about how ready they were for the change, most didn’t know what it was. We can fix that, though.
Whether you’re new to accessible email design or want to get set before EAA, we’ve got you covered. Let’s walk through what it takes to make an accessible email design.
Table of contents
- What is accessible design?
- Accessible design principals for email designers
- Common accessibility mistakes designers will make
- Accessible email examples for designers
- The designers toolkit for email accessibility
What is accessible design?
Accessible design is a design process to create content and experiences that everyone can easily use and enjoy, regardless of their abilities. Subscribers experience your emails differently because of disabilities or situations like:
- Permanent conditions like blindness.
- Temporary injuries like concussions or a broken wrist.
- Situational challenges like navigating a phone with an off-hand while the other is full.
While considering people with disabilities is simply the kind thing to do, there are also serious business benefits to accessibility in design.
More than one in four American adults have some type of disability, and they represent $21 billion in discretionary income. If you ignore people with disabilities in your design process, you alienate potential customers, cut potential revenue, and even open your organization up to lawsuits for not complying with legal requirements.
In a Litmus Live 2024 discussion on accessible emails, Sarah Gallardo, a Lead Email Developer and Email Accessibility Specialist at Oracle Digital Experience Agency, shared, “It’s not enough to come up with a good design—lots of designers can do that. Email is a communication platform above everything else, so it’s kind of a big deal when you’re not communicating to 27% of your recipients.”
While accessible design is the phrase you’ll hear most often, there are a few other terms to be aware of.
1. Accessible design
Accessible design considers the usability for people with specific disabilities—like visual, cognitive, or motor impairments—and the assistive technology they use to consume information.
For example, people with visual impairments may rely on screen readers that read emails aloud, meaning an image-only email would be silent. Subscribers need elements clearly organized and labeled because they navigate with a keyboard instead of a mouse.
2. Inclusive design
There is a difference between accessibility vs. inclusion in email design.
Inclusive design embraces the full range of human diversity including ability, language, culture, gender, age, and other forms of difference.
Examples of inclusive design include using inclusive imagery, writing in plain language, and using translated and localized content. You could also include people with varying levels of technology access by reducing design load times.
3. Universal design
Universal design creates content that works for every person and platform. For example, email designers and developers can use responsive layouts to adapt to different screens and use a single email design that’s accessible for everyone.
Accessible design principles for email designers
Accessibility design best practices all have the same goal—to help everyone enjoy your email. While there are some specific assistive tools or conditions to consider, you’ll see that, generally, accessible design is just good design. You may even make accessible design choices without even realizing it.
Jump to tips for:
- Live text
- Text hierarchy
- Left-justification
- Font size
- Line spacing
- Color contrast
- Background images
- Button design
- Links
- Layout
Use real text instead of all-image emails
The temptation to use all-image emails is strong when you want a quick way to customize the look and feel of your email to your exact standards. We ask you to take your cursor off the Photoshop layer and back away slowly, though.
Real text in HTML is the accessible design winner for a handful of reasons.
Assistive technologies like screen readers can only access the underlying code of an email, not the text in an image. That means that text saved within an image is silent to anyone using a reader. People who use screen magnifiers and custom zoom settings might struggle with blurry photos, too.
Plus, many email clients turn off images for security reasons. When this happens, nobody can read your email.
Live text is also searchable, meaning subscribers can find the newsletter or promo code they remember you sending them last week. SEO for email is a thing!
Finally, using real text instead of locking it away in an image lets you personalize messages with dynamic content.
Create an organized and scannable hierarchy
Both cognitive disabilities and situational disabilities (like being in a hurry or being distracted) make it hard for people to read and understand long, uniform blocks of text. Hierarchy—or creating visual differences that reinforce importance—helps those users quickly consume content in email.
By using larger text size, accessible color, and strategic placement, you can create emails that are easily scanned and read. Try creating bold, high-contrast headlines above smaller portions of copy, and allow for enough whitespace between sections to avoid content bleeding together.
Left-justify your email copy
Using both real text and hierarchy can aid readability, but the alignment of your copy also affects the readability of your emails.
Reading relies on visual cues to make sense of where we are on a page or screen. One of the most important cues is the start of a new line, which acts as an anchor for our eyes when jumping around an email. If you center the text, eyes and minds have to find where a new line starts, making it taxing and confusing.
Justified text increases spaces between words and characters to create a uniform block of text. While the symmetry is nice on first glance, and you do have a consistent line start, it presents other accessibility issues. If a person uses a screen magnifier or zooms in for readability, they’ll have to make sense of those random spaces (or scrunches) between words.
If you only have a line or two of copy, centered text is okay. You do need to consider how the placement of your text changes with screen size or zoom, though.
When you have more than a couple lines of copy, opt for left-justified text. It’s the most accessible option all around and it feels more natural and comfortable to the eyes.
Use a minimum font size of 14px
“What is this, an email for ants!?”
Small fonts place your design somewhere in the realm of annoying to entirely unreadable. Luckily, it’s an easy fix. Some mobile devices, like iPhones, automatically enlarge text that is less than 14px in size. Setting your font to at least 14px—preferably even larger—can help create better reading experiences. Remember that assistive zooming devices or screen magnifiers might change exactly where your font sits in an email.
You also need to be mindful of the font you choose. A web safe font is the more reliable option, and they include the most accessible fonts like Arial and Helvetica. If the web safe fonts ruin your vibe, you can experiment with web fonts, but you’ll need a fallback font when web fonts aren’t supported.
Make every email count for everyone
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Optimize your line spacing
Your text’s readability also hinges on line spacing in a very Goldilocks way.
When lines of copy are too close together, it’s hard to tell them apart. Conversely, when they are too far apart, it’s hard to know where to look for the next line as they all look like short, individual paragraphs.
The World Wide Web Consortium even has clear accessibility guidelines around proper line spacing, suggesting 1.5 to 2 is preferred to single spacing.
Keep contrast high
Contrast is the difference between two elements in an email. Most often, it’s the difference between the color of your copy and the background color on which it sits. Too low contrast and people with low vision can have an extraordinarily hard time reading an email.
Fortunately, there are well-established guidelines for proper contrast. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines clearly define how they determine appropriate contrast. The main rule is to make elements distinguishable. In their words,“Make it easier for users to see and hear digital content including separating foreground from background.”
There are various ways to do this, including using color, font weight, and font size. Regardless of which method you use, make sure your elements contrast enough with those around them so your email design is accessible.
Tip: Accessibility group WebAIM even has a free contrast checker online that can help identify any accessibility issues before your subscribers do. In the example below, the contrast on the CTA button passes the WebAIM test, but the tan header on the blue background does not.
Balance the size of background images and texts
Background images are a must-have in many email designs, and we’ve already talked about using live text on top of them instead of in them. Something else to consider, though, is balancing the amount of text with the size of the image. Sarah Gallardo noted, “Users that use zoom tools as an assistive technology can increase the size of text to 200% or 300%, so we need a background image that can contain that text when it increases that much.”
“Users that use zoom tools as an assistive technology can increase the size of text to 200% or 300%, so we need a background image that can contain that text when it increases that much.”
Make buttons easy to see, understand, and click
Buttons—your call to action. This is the step you hope every reader will take. It’s kind of important, right? Accessibility in design is critical for elements as important as buttons.
Your buttons need descriptive text and high contrast for the same reasons the rest of your design does.
Designing with accessibility for color blindness in mind also means you can’t rely on colors to convey meaning, like green for positive or red for negative. While you can still use those colors, be sure to add symbols or text with it so everyone understands the meaning.
Accessible buttons should also be large enough to be tapped by even the biggest, shakiest thumbs or pointing devices. And make sure there is ample whitespace around those targets so there aren’t accidental link taps and avoidable frustration for users.
wistia-player[media-id=’2qi4z0t5tw’]:not(:defined) { background: center / contain no-repeat url(‘https://fast.wistia.com/embed/medias/2qi4z0t5tw/swatch’); display: block; filter: blur(5px); }
Add contrast and hover effects to links
Text links need to be distinguishable from the surrounding text—hence why the default for a link is underlined blue text. When overriding that styling, you should do so sparingly. Underlines, especially, are a visual indication that there’s a link in the email. There are approximately 300 million colorblind people in the world, so relying solely on color for link styling puts them in a difficult position.
Including a hover state on interactive elements like links and buttons is another great way to create a better, more accessible user experience.
Anthony from UX Movement sums it up nicely in his article, Why Your Links Need a Hover Effect,“Whether your users are colorblind or not, everyone should be able to spot and target links with ease. Adding a hover effect to your links is a simple and effective way to meet their needs. Links and text shouldn’t just look different. For the best user experience, they should also behave differently.”
Keep your email layout simple
Complex, multi-column layouts can lead to sensory overload for users. The more complicated a design, the easier it is to get lost in an email, so simpler layouts are often preferred. Single-column layouts are especially effective at creating accessible campaigns—they simplify content and help reinforce hierarchy, aiding scanability in the process.
Single-column layouts are also generally easier to adjust across different screen sizes. As more of the world comes online, more people are using smaller mobile devices to access the internet and email. Regardless of your technique, keeping your emails responsive across different devices is a great way to improve the subscriber experience.
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Common accessibility mistakes designers will make
Mistakes happen, but it’s what you learn from them that matters. Here are a few ways to make sure you work toward more accessible email designs while you create.
1. Don’t skip key accessible design principles
Some of the most common accessibility mistakes involve the principles we covered in the previous section, like locking text away in images.
While the goal is always to make your emails as accessible as possible, don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Small changes can add up over time, and it’s better to make some improvements than none at all.
Starting with accessible email templates and using tools like Litmus to check for accessibility in design automatically takes some of the mental load off of you, too.
How to fix it:
- Use pre-tested email design templates with accessibility baked in.
- Check your designs against an accessibility testing tool like Litmus.
2. Avoid working in a silo
Email accessibility is a team effort between design, development, and copywriting. Share what you learn, explain your motivations, and work together to find a balance between aesthetics and accessibility.
For example, getting the intended message across with screen reader accessibility can take a little extra care unless you want “We 
love email! ” to sound like “We clapping hands love clapping hands email! clapping hands.”
In addition to collaborating with a variety of email disciplines, it helps to work with people with different abilities.
Molly Burke, a content creator, consultant, and advocate, shared her advice to brands on the What’s Trending podcast,“I can’t express enough that I represent myself as one blind woman—I don’t represent the entire community. But I think we need to be involved at every touchpoint. So that means hiring inclusively internally so we can be in all the rooms every step of the way.”
How to fix it:
- Share what you learn about accessibility (and why it matters) to your team. You can forward them our guide to accessibility coding standards and tips on writing for accessibility. Our virtual event about why businesses must embrace email accessibility is another great resource.
- Ask for subscriber feedback about their experience with your content and compile the findings into a report.
3. No more making assumptions
Paul Airy, Email Design and Development Consultant, and author of the book, A Type of Email, shared, “When we design and develop emails, we tend to assume our subscribers will be able to read and interact with them, based on whether we can read and interact with them. We judge the quality of other people’s experience based on our own. The truth is that every person, and the way they experience the world, is different.”
Being open to learning and experimenting with accessibility in design is a needed first step. You can also give subscribers the option to choose their experience and accessibility features with an Accessibility Switcher
.
How to fix it:
- Use an accessibility checker like Litmus to experience your emails like your subscribers might with visual impairment filters and screen readers.
- Try navigating an email with your device’s built-in voice over and keyboard controls instead of a mouse—you’ll gain a new perspective!
- Check whether it’s time for an email accessibility audit.
Accessible email examples for designers
Accessible design considers specific disabilities and scenarios, but a lot of the design principles end up creating visuals that are just better for everyone. For example, nobody, regardless of abilities, wants to hunt for an obscure link or try to make sense of a message without a visual hierarchy. Accessible design is good design.
That means that you probably already use accessible email design to some extent, and a few tools and checks can help you close any remaining gap.
Litmus—combining colors and symbols
Colors can convey mood and branding, but they aren’t reliable on their own for conveying meaning. In a recent email about an accessibility webinar (how appropriate! You can watch the recording here.), our designers combined colors and symbols.
Even when viewed with a color deficiency, like the green-blind/deuteranopia screenshot below, the symbols still make sense. The symbol and background colors don’t melt together for different color deficiencies, and the symbols still convey the same meaning outside of their original color.
While there are online color blindness simulator tools, we like the at-a-glance view of Litmus’ Visual Impairment Filters. You can check what your designs look like across different color deficiencies in one spot and take a closer look if any aren’t right.
ASOS – personalized content in the header
Remember how we mentioned that using live text is better for accessibility and personalization? Here’s a prime example. ASOS uses weather data to create a dynamic headline—it either says it’s raining out or that rain is on the way. The large, colorful text draws your eye in, too.
Bulk Powders – strong visual hierarchy
Bulk Powders used a live poll in their email to gauge their audience’s plans for the London Marathon with high contrast, clear content organization, and descriptive CTAs. If you plan to use multiple columns in your design, make sure it’s responsive to fit different screen sizes.
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The designer’s toolkit for email accessibility
You’ve just learned a lot about inclusive design and creating accessible emails, but you don’t have to put it all into practice on your own.
Litmus helps designers create beautiful and accessible emails, no matter their experience level.
- Litmus Email Design Library lets you create, store, manage, and collaborate on accessible email designs that you can reuse and rework. Establish brand colors, HTML email templates, and code modules to stick to your go-to look and feel without sacrificing accessibility.
- Litmus Email Builder gives team members a place to easily build accessible emails, either with the drag and drop email builder or HTML email builder.
- Litmus Email Testing Accessibility Checks automatically check your designs across 40+ accessibility areas and best practices. Plus, you can hear what your email sounds like to screen readers and preview the designs with color vision deficiency filters.
Start making a difference today
Maximize your email’s impact with Litmus to ensure accessibility and inclusivity for all subscribers — no matter their abilities.
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