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Your Go-to List of Email Accessibility Guidelines Under the European Accessibility Act

Susmit Panda - Content writer
european accessibility act for emails

The European Accessibility Act (EAA) has officially taken effect, signaling more than a legal mandate. It is a defining opportunity for brands to lead with inclusivity and rethink how they engage every individual.

So far, much of the EAA spotlight has been on websites, apps, and digital interfaces. But email, often the first and most frequent customer touchpoint, deserves equal attention. From promotions and onboarding flows to service alerts and support updates, emails shape brand interactions in more ways than one. In fact:

At Email Mavlers, we see the EAA as more than a rulebook. It is an invitation to design email experiences that are not only compliant but empathetic and accessible. 

So then, how to make emails accessible?

In this blog post, we walk you through the principles of designing and developing emails that truly include everyone, including accessible email best practices, and more. Let’s roll! 

What is EAA compliance and why it matters for email marketers

The European Accessibility Act (EAA) is a directive by the European Union (EU) that mandates a wide range of products and services to be accessible to people with disabilities. It aims to remove barriers created by different rules in EU member states, making it easier for companies to operate across the EU and fostering a more inclusive society. 

While the EAA covers a broad scope of products and services, including hardware like computers and ATMs, it is particularly significant for digital services, which include email marketing.

For email marketers, EAA compliance is a critical legal requirement, not just a “nice-to-have” best practice. The act applies to businesses that provide digital services or sell products to consumers within the EU, regardless of where the business is based. This means that if you send emails to people in the EU, your email campaigns must be accessible. 

The EAA is binding law. So, failure to comply can bring hefty fines, lawsuits, and reputational harm, with penalties differing across EU member states. (See table further down).

But EAA compliance is not just about avoiding legal trouble; it’s a strategic move with significant business benefits as well:

In fact, Campaign Monitor reports an 18% boost in engagement for accessible emails, while the Click-Able Email Accessibility Benchmark Report shows accessible campaigns driving twice the conversion rates of non-accessible ones.

Together, these benefits show that accessibility is a powerful way to strengthen customer relationships, expand reach, and future-proof your email marketing in an increasingly inclusive digital landscape. 

Now, let’s find out how to make emails accessible for real. 

Email accessibility guidelines: Key principles

At its foundation, EAA email design guidelines draw from WCAG 2.2 Level AA, which is structured around four core principles:

  1. Perceivable
  2. Operable
  3. Understandable
  4. Robust

Based on these, here are the core guidelines for accessible email design. (You can save this as a robust email accessibility compliance checklist too!)

1. Perceivable

Content should be presented in ways that users can recognize and process, regardless of their abilities:

2. Operable

Users should be able to navigate and interact with the content effectively.

3. Understandable 

Information and design should be easy for users to follow and interpret.

4. Robust

Emails should remain accessible across different devices, clients, and assistive technologies.

A word on using animated GIFs in email

Email GIF-triggered seizures can occur when flickering or rapidly changing images, patterns, or lights within an email—such as flashing GIFs, animated banners, or embedded videos—reach certain frequencies (typically between 3 and 60 hertz) and levels of intensity. These visual effects can overstimulate the brain’s neurons, particularly in individuals with photosensitive epilepsy, leading to seizures or other adverse neurological responses.

Source: Association for Computing Machinery

Even for recipients without diagnosed conditions, such content can cause discomfort, dizziness, or eye strain, making it not only a health risk but a barrier to accessibility and UX.

So here’s a list of best practices for using GIFs in email design that balance creativity with accessibility and performance:

Best practices to meet email accessibility standards

Accessibility begins with intent, not obligation—and the EAA marks a meaningful step in that direction. More than compliance, accessibility is a strategic choice, a reflection of brand values, and a true market differentiator.

Sarah Gallardo, Associate Principal Technical Producer at Stitch, shares these best practices for accessible email design:

Accessibility is a continuous practice, not a one-time fix. Every choice, from text to layout, shapes whether your emails reach all users or leave some behind.

Email accessibility testing tools

To ensure your emails really follow EAA email design guidelines, you can test them using these online tools:

Let’s take a quick look at each of these email testing tools. 

WebAIM Contrast Checker 

The WebAIM Contrast Checker is a free, browser-based tool designed to help designers and developers evaluate the color contrast between foreground (text) and background colors for web and digital content accessibility. It instantly calculates the contrast ratio based on color values entered (hex codes or by using its color picker), showing whether the combination meets WCAG 2.0 and 2.1 accessibility requirements for text, links, and graphical components. 

Source: WebAIM Contrast Checker

For testing accessible email design, consider these best practices:

VoiceOver

Apple’s VoiceOver is a built-in screen reader technology available on macOS, iOS, and other Apple devices that converts on-screen text and interface elements into spoken words for users who are blind or have low vision. It reads aloud descriptions of text, buttons, links, images (via alt text), and other UI elements, allowing users to navigate and interact with digital content without needing to see the screen.

For testing your emails on VoiceOver, keep these testing approaches in mind:

Coblis

Coblis (Color BLIndness Simulator) is an online color blindness simulator tool that helps visualize how images, designs, and color schemes appear to people with different types of color vision deficiencies. Users upload images (such as email screenshots), and Coblis simulates how those visuals look to users with red-green blindness (protanopia, deuteranopia), blue-yellow blindness (tritanopia), and other forms of color blindness.

These are some practical ways to test your email templates on Coblis:

Accessible-email.org

Accessible-email.org is an initiative focused on promoting accessibility and usability in email marketing. It offers an accessibility evaluation tool specifically designed for email marketing professionals and developers to assess the current accessibility level of their emails and identify improvements needed to make emails more inclusive. Here’s how to use it:

Designing for accessibility in email: The takeaway

Accessibility is a continuous process, but the payoff is substantial: accessible content fosters stronger engagement by making every user feel valued and included, broadens your reach by removing barriers that might prevent people from interacting with your brand, and establishes your organization as one that genuinely cares about inclusivity.

Now that you know how EAA impacts email design, you’re on the threshold. Let us help you cross it with intent. If you want to make your email campaigns fully accessible and EAA-compliant, contact our team at Email Mavlers to get started!

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