The 5 Hidden Accessibility Mistakes in Email Campaigns

Most email designers and marketers have good intentions. They’re trying to make something that looks great and performs well. But small technical choices can quietly lock out a portion of the audience, especially people using assistive technology.

Accessibility isn’t a niche topic or a compliance checklist. It’s part of smart, data-driven marketing. When emails are easier to read, navigate, and understand, you’ll see improvement across the metrics that matter most: open rates, click-throughs, conversions, and overall engagement.

Here are five common accessibility issues we see in email campaigns and how to fix them.

1. Thin or Light Weight Fonts and Color Contrast Rules

Most email designers understand the basics of color contrast. It’s one of the better-known accessibility practices and rightly so. What’s less talked about is how font weight directly affects contrast and legibility. Even if your color ratio technically passes, ultra-light or hairline typefaces can still fail accessibility standards because they don’t render cleanly across devices and display resolutions.

Thin or lightweight fonts are especially risky because of how screens display them. Each letter’s stroke gets rasterized into pixels and smoothed through anti-aliasing, which softens edges but also reduces visual contrast. The result is text that looks faint, uneven, or blurry, even at larger sizes.

• Normal text under 24px should be at least 4.5:1.
• Large text (18pt/24px or more) should be at least 3:1.

Ultra-light or hairline typefaces should be avoided, even at larger font sizes. Because of how screens render text, these thin strokes get rasterized into pixels and softened through anti-aliasing. That smoothing process lowers visible contrast and makes characters appear faint or unstable, especially on mobile devices and high-resolution displays. Even if the color ratio meets WCAG standards, text that’s too light will still be difficult for many users to read.

Quick fix:

• Keep body text at 16px or larger and use medium or semi-bold weights.
• Check contrast before sending.
• Favor clarity over style.

2. Text Embedded in Images

Many marketers embed text in images because they worry about how emails will render across different clients. It can feel like a safe workaround since what you design is exactly what your audience sees. In reality, this approach creates more problems than it solves. It slows down production, limits flexibility, and introduces serious accessibility issues.

Text that’s built into an image is invisible to screen readers and disappears entirely if the image fails to load. When that image contains important or actionable content such as a coupon code, promotional offer, or product information, the user misses it completely. It also creates workflow friction because every copy change requires reopening a design file and exporting a new graphic.

If your primary message or CTA is locked in an image, you’re risking lost engagement the moment that image doesn’t render properly.

Quick fix:

• Keep key copy visible and readable as HTML text in the email body.
• Use images to support, not carry, your message.
• If you must include text in an image, repeat it elsewhere as real text, and include an informative alt label on the image.

3. Overuse of Alt Text and Underuse of aria-hidden

Adding alt text everywhere doesn’t help. It can actually make the experience worse for people using screen readers.

When every decorative background or divider image has alt text, users hear irrelevant details that break the flow of the content. For example, instead of hearing your headline, a screen reader might output:

“Alt text: wavy blue texture.”

That’s what a user hears before your real message. It’s confusing, and it makes the experience feel robotic and chaotic.

aria-hidden="true" tells screen readers to skip those nonessential visuals. Used correctly, it creates a smoother, more focused reading experience.

Quick fix:

• Write alt text only for images that are actionable or convey meaningful information.
• Add aria-hidden="true" and set an empty alt="" attribute on decorative <img> tags.
• Review templates regularly to keep things clean.

4. Layout Tables Without role="presentation"

HTML tables are still a common way to build email layouts, but screen readers interpret them as data tables unless told otherwise. That means they’ll describe the layout itself in table terms instead of the content.

Without the role="presentation" attribute, a screen reader might read something like:

“Table with three rows and two columns. Row one column one: header image. Row one column two: empty cell. Row two column one: body text.”

To the listener, this sounds like a spreadsheet, not an email. The structure makes no sense in that format and the message is lost.

Adding role="presentation" tells assistive tech to ignore the table structure and read the content in a logical flow.

Quick fix:

<table role="presentation">
  <tr>
    <td>Your content here</td>
  </tr>
</table>

This small change prevents screen readers from describing your layout cell by cell and helps users actually understand the message.

5. Ignoring Semantic Markup

HTML provides structure and meaning when used properly. Tags like <h1>, <p>, and <ul> define hierarchy and flow, which screen readers rely on to interpret the content.

Many templates skip this and use generic <div> or <span> elements styled to look right but with no semantic meaning. The email might look fine visually, but assistive tools can’t identify headings, lists, or buttons correctly.

Quick fix:

• Use headings and paragraphs for real structure.
• Use proper lists for grouped items.
• Style links and buttons with <a> tags and clear, descriptive labels.

Semantic markup keeps your content readable, organized, and accessible across devices and tools.

Final Thoughts

Accessibility makes your emails stronger. It’s not extra work, it’s better work. These improvements take very little time and often lead to higher engagement and better performance across your main KPIs.

When you build accessible emails, you’re not only including more people, you’re improving your reach and conversions. Ignoring accessibility means excluding potential customers and introducing unnecessary risk, since accessibility laws in the US, EU, and other regions continue to expand.

At MailMoxie, we treat accessibility as a performance standard. It’s a practical way to drive results, reach more users, and protect your brand from preventable issues.

Next up in this series: How dark mode breaks your beautiful emails (and how to fix it).