By role · Marketers
Campaigns, Email, and the Claims You Make
Marketing owns the pages that get audited last, the two channels that get checked least, and every accessibility claim the business makes in public.
Most of what the public sees is pages your team built. The main site got audited. In most companies the campaign pages did not.
Accessible sites go back out of shape through marketing, and the mechanism is usually the same. The main site gets reviewed. The campaign landing page, built fast on its own template because the launch date moved, gets left out of scope. That page is the one in the advertisement. It is the first thing a new customer ever sees of the business. You own it, and in most companies it has never been in an audit.
Marketing also owns the two channels that get checked least. An email cannot be fixed once it has gone. A social post is often an image with the whole message inside the pixels. Some assistive technology can now read text out of an image, which helps. Recovery by the reader's software is not the same as writing the words. And there is a third thing here that outranks both. Any accessibility claim your copy makes is a promise the whole business then has to stand behind.
What you own
- Landing pages and campaign templates built outside the main design system.
- Email campaigns, and the plain-text alternative as its own deliverable. It is not what a reader sees when their client blocks images, because the HTML message is still what gets shown, so both versions need testing separately.
- Social posts. Alt text on images, captions on video, and camel-cased hashtags so a screen reader can find the word boundaries.
- Captions and transcripts on video, corrected rather than accepted the way the machine wrote them.
- Every accessibility claim the copy makes, and whether the business can stand behind it. A conformance logo is a claim under the standard. A claim carries five things: the date, the guidelines by title and version with the link to them, the level met, a description of the pages covered saying whether subdomains are in, and the technologies the content relies on.
What is not yours
The main site's design system and its component library. What is yours is making sure the campaign template does not quietly undo what the design system already got right. That is what happens when a landing page starts from a blank file.
Where to start, in order
- Accessibility and SEOThe eight practices that serve both at once, and the one claim marketing copy keeps making that never survives review.
- Email accessibility checklistEvery check to run before you send, on the one channel where there is no going back and fixing it.
- Video, captions and transcriptsAuto-generated captions are a first pass. They only become a deliverable once somebody has confirmed they are accurate, because the machine drops the word "not" and nobody notices until a customer does.
- The accessibility statementHow to write one that does not backfire, and the three ways the copy usually gets it wrong. Where a public-sector accessibility law applies to you, it may name an enforcement body that has to appear in the statement, and you add that yourself because our generator leaves the paragraph generic.
- Why accessibility mattersThe business case with its sources attached, for the meeting where you have to argue for the budget out loud.
The mistakes we see most from this role
Not a criticism. These are the failures that recur across audits, and knowing them is most of avoiding them.
- Building the campaign landing page on its own template, which starts from nothing and inherits none of the fixes already sitting in the design system.
- Sending a campaign that is one large image. Blocked images leave a reader with whatever alt text you wrote and nothing else, and a screen reader reads the same thin substitute for a message you spent a week on.
- Posting the whole message inside an image with no alt text attached to it.
- Claiming conformance to a standard nobody has ever tested the site against, in a statement that is now a written promise.
- Letting an overlay drop a badge on the site, which puts a claim in your footer that nobody in the business approved. In April 2025 the FTC finalised a consent order against one overlay vendor. $1 million, which may go into a fund used for relief including consumer redress rather than a guaranteed refund. And a bar on representing that its automated product makes any website WCAG-compliant, unless the evidence is in hand at the moment the claim is made.
- Arguing internally that captions pay for themselves in international reach. An ordinary translation track carries the dialogue and drops the speaker changes and the sound, so it is not an accessibility deliverable until it carries those too. Reach is a fine argument for the budget and it is not the compliance one.
Tools you will use
Other roles
Find out what your site actually needs.
The free scan checks 10 pages in a real browser against all 90 supported automated rules, keeps its 27 best-practice checks separate from WCAG findings, and names the rule behind every finding.