Issue #256 All About Email

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #256 of All About Email!

Last week, my final guest author of the summer, Annett Forcier, explored email brand guides and what happens when dark mode gets involved.

This week, I want to dig into a stat from Litmus and Validity about AI adoption and accessibility. It sounds encouraging. But I think we need to be careful about what we take from it.

Let’s go! 👇

🚨 According to the State of Email 2026 report landing page, advanced AI adopters are:

The research surveyed around 500 marketing professionals across the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand.

💡 Notice the wording: more likely to follow accessibility guidelines. That doesn’t mean their emails are “54% more accessible”. And it doesn’t tell us that introducing AI improved anybody’s accessibility by 54%.

🤔 Before turning this into advice, I’d want to know:

💡 This issue looks at Litmus and Validity’s publicly available findings. I haven’t reviewed the full report or survey questionnaire, so I’m focusing on what the headline figures tell us rather than assessing the research methodology itself.

Validity’s press release describes advanced adopters as teams that have incorporated AI into their workflows and decision-making.

It says AI helps them produce accessible campaigns more efficiently and tackle compliance gaps systematically.

💡 That’s a possible explanation. But I’d like to see:

The public description also leaves room for another possibility: these teams may already have better processes.

Think about a team with someone responsible for accessibility, reusable templates, a proper review process and time allocated to fixing problems:

🤔 Are we seeing the effect of AI, the effect of how the team works, or a mixture of both?

💡 In Issue #201, guest author Sarah Gallardo suggested starting with questions about the existing process: who writes the alt text, who checks contrast, and how the people making and approving emails communicate.

I picked those questions out in my own comments because they’re such a useful starting point. They’re also the kinds of differences I’d want to understand between these teams before attributing the gap to AI.

If a team introduced new templates, clearer content rules and an accessibility review at the same time, it would be difficult to give AI all the credit for any improvement.

🚨 That’s also why I’m cautious about the idea that cleaning up HTML for AI automatically delivers accessibility.

Clear structure is useful, but accessibility involves more than tidy markup. The WCAG requirements also address things such as text alternatives, contrast and keyboard access where applicable.

The EAA’s main application date was 28 June 2025. It covers specified products and consumer services, including e-commerce, with exemptions and transitional provisions.

It isn’t a blanket rule that every marketing email to anyone in the EU has identical obligations. The EU’s business guidance explains the scope.

💡 If the groups differ in the services they provide or the markets they serve, that could affect their investment in accessibility.

(But we’d need those breakdowns to investigate it.)

💡 Teams may interpret “following WCAG” differently.

Some might mean they have a policy; others might mean they regularly test their output.

That’s a question of survey wording and verification, not a reason to assume respondents are wrong.

💡 In Issue #241, I covered the Email Markup Consortium’s finding that just 8 of 376,348 emails analysed passed all its automated accessibility checks.

That’s a separate study, but it brings me back to a practical question: whatever tools we use, how are we checking the emails subscribers actually receive?

I’ve had to ask this about my own newsletter. In Issue #177, I shared what Parcel flagged before I made changes: some issues were template-related, while others needed a conversation with Beehiiv.

💡 That gave me something concrete to work with: which problems I could fix myself, and which needed help from the platform.

Here’s how I’d approach it in your programme:

🚨 If AI reliably helps you remove barriers, that’s awesome! Keep checking the finished emails and build what works into your regular process.

Validity sells AI-powered marketing tools, so it has a commercial interest in how you interpret these findings. That’s why we should examine the evidence carefully. It doesn’t, by itself, tell us whether the explanation is right or wrong.

The same scrutiny needs to apply to my alternative explanations.

🤔 This is a useful finding, but I want to understand what’s behind it. Once I’ve read the full report, I’ll revisit these questions, including whether it changes my interpretation.

For now, I wouldn’t use this headline alone to decide whether AI will improve your emails’ accessibility.

So, I’ll leave you with this: if you’ve introduced AI into your email workflow, have you checked whether the finished emails are easier to read and use? What actually improved?

Hit reply, {{first_name|friend}}. I’d love to hear what you’re finding.

That’s it for this week. 👋

Simon

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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I hope you have a great week! 👋