Issue #241 All About Email

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #241 of All About Email!

Last week was about Google I/O 2026, and Gmail got a significant AI upgrade across the board. If you're an email marketer, you need to know what's coming.

This week, I want to properly dig into something I flagged in last week's news section. The Email Markup Consortium's 2026 Accessibility Report. Because a 99.88% failure rate needs more attention.

Let’s go! 👇

🧠 The Email Markup Consortium published its 2026 Accessibility Report last month, and it's not a comfortable read (sadly, it never is😬).

They analysed 376,348 emails sent between May 2025 and May 2026 across industries, geographies, and senders. The results:

💡 Even those 8 that passed automated testing were later found to have issues on manual inspection. Alt text that didn't match the image content. Text is too small to read on narrow viewports. A near-perfect score on paper, but not perfect in reality.

🚨 The industry basically hasn't moved in years. In 2022, the failure rate was 99.9%.

🤔 I know what you might be thinking. "I'm not a developer. My ESP handles the HTML. This isn't my problem."

But this is not just a developer issue, in my opinion.

💡 Accessibility isn't just a technical compliance checkbox. It directly affects how many people can actually read and use your emails:

🧠 And even setting disability aside entirely, many of the things that make an email accessible also make it better for everyone:

✅ These are only a few examples, and they're good email practice!

Here are the most common failures from this year's report. 👇

If a subscriber has their email client set to a right-to-left language (Arabic, Hebrew, etc.) and opens your email without a direction set, the layout can break completely. Not rendering oddly, it can just break.

💡 It's a one-attribute fix on the part of the platform or developer. The fact that it's sitting at 97% is a tooling problem, not a knowledge problem (more on this later).

🤔 Many email templates still use HTML tables to lay out visual content, columns, buttons, and image grids.

That's fine, but without telling assistive technology that those tables are just for layout (not actual data tables), a screen reader will try to interpret every cell as data.

It announces column headers that don't exist. It reads the structure, not the content.

Fixable at the template level. But most builders aren't doing it by default.

💡 This one's on us as senders, not just platforms.

"Click here." "Read more." "Learn more." These are the culprits. For someone navigating by keyboard or using a screen reader to skim links, these phrases tell them nothing about where the link goes.

🚨 The fix is simple: write the destination or action into the link. "Read the full case study." "Download the 2026 guide." "View your order status." More descriptive and better for everyone.

🧠 More than half of the emails tested failed the colour contrast standard. The requirement is a 4.5:1 ratio between text and background colour.

💡 If your brand palette uses light grey text on white, or pale tones over coloured backgrounds, it's worth checking. Tools like Coolors and the WebAIM Contrast Checker will give you a pass/fail in seconds (Colour Contrast Checker is my personal favourite).

🚨 This is the “Critical” rated one, the highest severity. Nearly half of all emails tested contained images without alt attributes.

💡 Not blank alt text (which is fine for decorative images). No attribute. That means a screen reader announces "image" and nothing else. For linked images especially, this also rolls up into the "links with no text" problem: a linked image with no alt text is an invisible, unlabelled button.

🤔 This year, the EMC audited newsletter platforms directly for the first time, and since you're reading this on Beehiiv, I thought it was worth calling out specifically.

They audited 2,189 Beehiiv emails (from the last six months of the dataset). 100% failed automated testing.

💡 Here's the breakdown:

On a positive note, almost all Beehiiv emails passed the lang check, only 0.37% failed language attribution. That puts Beehiiv noticeably ahead of Substack and Shopify on that specific issue.

🚨 The EMC notes that these results don't automatically mean the platform is at fault; user choices matter too. But platforms do have a responsibility to guide users toward better defaults.

✅ A suggested fix for the specific call-out for Beehiiv: the dir attribute fix looks like it could be automated. The platform could infer the text direction from the already set language and apply it. That's a platform-level fix, not a sender-level one.

In the meantime, as Beehiiv users, we can control only the descriptive link text and alt text for every linked image.

💡 Mark Robbins from the EMC made a quick video explaining what the missing dir and lang attributes issues are and showing some examples of how people might experience them.

🧠 The report goes beyond this year's sender behaviour and examines how well email clients support the HTML features required to build accessible emails.

They tested 37 accessibility-related HTML and CSS features across 43 email clients.

Not one client supports all 37.

💡 The top performers (and despite the winner, I still hate Apple Mail 🫠):

🚨 The big names most of your subscribers are probably using:

🤔 Gmail in particular gets called out in the report. It still doesn't support @media (prefers-color-scheme). The feature that lets email senders properly implement dark mode. Instead, Gmail enforces its own dark mode, which frequently creates colour-contrast issues that it then blames on senders.

The EMC notes that Google appears on the 2026 Forbes Accessibility 200 list for its broader accessibility efforts. The contrast in feature support with Gmail's is, to put it mildly, notable.

💡 Outlook on Windows (the legacy app with the famous rendering engine) scored just 11/37. But Microsoft is deprecating that old rendering engine and moving toward a more unified approach.

Several other Outlook surfaces are already scoring in the low-to-mid 20s… progress. 🐌

🚨 Not all of this is in your control. If your email client strips semantic HTML, or your ESP generates inaccessible table layouts by default, those are upstream problems.

But here's what you can do:

1. Fix your link text. Search your templates and recent sends for "click here," "read more," and "learn more." Replace them with specific, descriptive text. This is 100% in your control, costs nothing, and improves the email for everyone.

2. Add alt text to every linked image. If you use a linked banner, button image, or logo at the top of your emails, add alt text that describes where the link goes, not just what the image shows.

3. Check your colour contrast. Grab your brand colours and run them through a contrast checker. If anything fails, flag it to your designer. Many contrast failures stem from well-intentioned "soft" colour palettes that don't hold up for people with low vision.

💡 And if you want to go further: Parcel.io, which the EMC used for testing, has a free accessibility checker. You can run your HTML through it on their Community plan.

💡One thing I haven't mentioned yet: the European Accessibility Act (EEA) took full effect on June 28, 2025. It requires EU businesses with more than 10 employees to make their digital products and services accessible to everyone, and it's widely understood to apply to digital marketing materials, including emails.

🚨 While email isn't explicitly named in the directive, the EAA primarily targets products and services, and its application to marketing channels is still being interpreted at the member state level (it’s a grey area).

But here's the important bit. Enforcement is already happening. The first EAA lawsuits in France were filed in November 2025. The Netherlands has audits planned for this year. And fines vary significantly by country, from €60,000 in Ireland up to around €900,000 in Sweden.

Private legal action in France and private warning letters in Germany are the earliest confirmed enforcement activities. In Germany specifically, e-commerce operators began receiving warning letters from law firms citing accessibility violations within weeks of the law taking effect, not from regulators, but from opportunistic law firms using competition law.

💡 That's a pattern familiar to anyone who remembers the early days of GDPR enforcement.

🧠 And if you're outside the EU, the EAA works similarly to GDPR. If you serve EU customers or users, you're expected to comply regardless of where your business is based.

The EMC report shows the industry hasn't meaningfully improved in years. The EAA means that for a large chunk of the industry, "we'll get to it eventually" is no longer a safe answer.

The EMC's conclusion is worth reflecting on: this is a systemic problem. The same basic failures have dominated the top 10 for four consecutive years.

🤔 But I don't think most email marketers are ignoring accessibility because they don't care. I think it's because the tools we use haven't made it easy, and the consequences aren’t felt.

💡 The consequences aren't actually that distant. There are an estimated 1.3 billion people globally living with some form of visual impairment. Accessibility failures don't just affect a small edge case; they affect a significant proportion of any real subscriber list.

The emails that get this right won't just be more inclusive. They'll be clearer, better structured, and more useful for everyone.

🙋‍♂️ I'd love to know: “Does your team think about email accessibility at all? Is it on the radar, or is it something that's never really come up?”

Hit reply, {{first_name|friend}} (I read every one).

That's it for this week. 👋

Every week, as I write this newsletter, I'll share the track of the moment to create an unbelievably eclectic playlist just for your inbox.

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This week's excellent and insightful email news & tips:

If you have any questions about this email or email marketing, please reply, and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

I hope you have a great week! 👋