Creating accessible emails ensures that everyone—including people with disabilities—can read, understand, and interact with your messages. Whether your audience includes users who rely on screen readers, have limited mobility, or experience colour blindness, small adjustments can make a big difference. This guide will walk you through simple, effective ways to make your emails more inclusive, so your content reaches as many people as possible.
Adding Alt Text to images/videos
Screen readers are used by people who are blind or have low vision to help them navigate websites, apps and emails using audio. When it comes to your emails we want to make sure these screen readers are able to tell the user what images you've included in your email which they'll do by reading the Alt Text.
When you use an image block in NewZapp, make sure you're filling in the Alt Text field on the left hand side with a description of what is in the image.
Make sure if your image contains any text that this text is included in the Alt Text, so the visually impaired don't miss out on that information.
If you're using a Video block instead, once you've entered a link to the video the image in the email will automatically update to the first frame of your video and the Alt Text on the left hand side will update to the title of the video.
You can edit this as well.
Changing the background/text colour
Using accessible colour combinations in your emails can make a big difference for neurodivergent readers, such as those with ADHD, dyslexia, or sensory processing differences. High contrast between background and text—like dark text on a light background or vice versa—helps improve focus and reduces visual strain. Avoiding overly bright or clashing colours can also make your emails feel less overwhelming and easier to process. By choosing thoughtful colour schemes, you're helping more people comfortably engage with your content.
There's a brilliant website I've found where you can enter the hex codes of your text and background colours and it will tell you how well they contrast each other.
Dark Mode and contrasting text/colour
A lot of readers (myself being one of them) will have their emails in Dark Mode and doing this will change the way colours are reflected in the email. For example here's the same two text blocks in my inbox. Ironically, the red block is now a high contrast text block.
Unless you're email is entirely, black and white the chances are your colours will be changed, however this is something that is accepted as the case by Dark Mode users so there's no need to stress about that.
Dark Mode users have the option to view the email in light mode with the icon at the top of the email.
Using Emojis in your emails
Emojis a fun way of communicating and can add some whimsy to an email, however as they're made up of punctuation and characters, screen readers can struggle with them, so it's best not to overuse them and definitely don't use them to replace words in the middle of sentences!
Below is a rather extreme example of what I mean.
Listen to the emails yourself
Outlook now has a feature built in that allows you to listen to the email yourself to see how it's presented in a screen reader.
Send yourself a proof and click the 3 dots in top right corner. In the menu that loads, click "Show in immersive reader"
This will open a window where you can click the play button at the bottom and the program will read your email back to you. If anything doesn't sound right here, you can go back to the email editor and make changes before the final email is sent out.
Asking your readers
As much as these are all good suggestions to keep in mind when creating an email campaign, no two email campaigns will be the same and what might be a good idea is to ask your reader base if there is something you can do to make your emails more accessible.
This can easily be done by creating a survey in NewZapp with a simple text question of what can be done to improve our emails and make them more accessible
Surveys in NewZapp are anonymous and free text questions have their answers presented in a word cloud so you can see which suggestions are coming up the most.
You can learn more about creating surveys in NewZapp here.
If you have any questions about accessibility, please reach out to your account manager or email support@newzapp.com