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An Email Review Tests the Template Before the Next Send

For the marketing team that emails thousands of subscribers and wants the next send to read as well by ear as it looks on screen.

What We Keep Finding

Open your last campaign and picture it read aloud. If the template is one big image, a subscriber using a screen reader hears the subject line, then silence, then "unsubscribe". That is the whole email. And because email still runs on layout tables underneath the design, a screen reader can announce your tidy two-column newsletter as a data table, cell by baffling cell.

That table one has a fix nobody expects, and it is worth knowing before somebody quotes you for a rebuild. Most table advice tells you to add markup. For a table that is holding a layout rather than data, the answer is to take the table semantics away entirely, so the screen reader stops treating rows and columns as if they meant something. One attribute, in the template, once.

Which is really the whole economic argument here. You do not have a thousand pages to fix, you have a handful of templates. Fix the template once and every send after it inherits the fix, and that is about the best return accessibility work ever offers you.

One thing to be straight about before you buy. Conformance in the standard is defined for a web page, and an email is not one. It arrives by mail rather than being fetched from an address, and it is drawn by a mail client rather than a browser. There is a separate W3C document that maps these rules onto content that is not on the web, and that is the honest frame for an email template. So we apply the web rules, because they are the closest thing to a standard your templates can be held to. And we name every client and screen reader we tested on, rather than handing you a conformance claim nobody could support.

What We Check

Read your templates aloud with NVDA, JAWS and VoiceOver before the next send
Check the reading order survives the layout tables underneath the design
Review image-heavy templates for real text, and for alt text on what stays an image
Check every link makes sense heard on its own, since a subscriber skimming by ear gets no context
Check contrast in light mode and in the dark mode your subscribers' clients may impose

What You Get

Every service on this site runs the same three-pass engine: an automated scan, an expert review of all 55 WCAG 2.2 A and AA rules, and a hands-on session with a professional blind screen-reader user. You get one report with every finding screenshotted, ranked by user impact, and linked to its fix. Your team fixes, we verify: the re-audit is half price within 3 months.

The format is not a mystery either. Read the sample report before you spend anything.

The Honest Limit

One honest limit, and it is about what we can promise rather than what we can find. No conformance claim exists for an email, because the standard defines conformance for web pages and an inbox is not one. Every mail client also renders your template a little differently, so a template that reads perfectly in one can fall apart in another. What you get is a named list of the clients and screen readers we tested on and exactly what happened in each, which is a more useful thing to hold than a badge would have been.

What It Costs

Rapid Audit: $499, up to 10 pages you pick, report in 5 business days. Standard Audit: $1,499, up to 25 pages in 10 business days. Flat rates, no discovery calls, and a real blind screen-reader user on every engagement. Pick your pages. We bring the humans.

Order your audit Run the free scan first

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