Are your emails ready for the European Accessibility Act?

On June 28, 2025, the European Accessibility Act (EAA) will come into force. This is the implementation of a European directive common to all EU countries. The aim is to make products and services more accessible to people with disabilities. And, of course, email is one of them. In this article and live stream, we explain what you need to watch out for to ensure that your emailings and newsletters comply with the EAA.

European Accessibility ActWho's it for?

Not just for the blind, far from it! When we talk about disability and technical implementation, we often think of extreme sight problems. This of course applies to them, but also to all those with more minor disabilities (such as color differentiation problems) or problems of a completely different kind: motor impairment (need for an adapted keyboard or other), cognitive impairment (dyslexia) or other.

At Badsender, we were preaching for inclusive emails for some time now. We were highlighting the carrot: In France, for the visually impaired alone, nearly 2 million people are affected, i.e. almost 3% of the French population. By not making your communications accessible, you're depriving yourself of these people who could be interested in your products or services.

And now Europe has brought out the stick: From June 28, 2025, this will be a legal obligation..

What does the European Accessibility Act mean in practice?

In practice, the text does not give precise specifications on what needs to be put in place. Don't forget that the EAA covers much more than just email: it extends to telephony services, e-books, banking services, etc.

I confess I haven't found any more information on this subject. Will each country be responsible for setting more precise requirements? Perhaps. If you'd like to dig deeper, I'll leave you to it. link to the European Commission website.

Here's a reminder of good email accessibility practices, to keep you up to date:

• The <table> must have a role="none" or role="presentation" to indicate to screen readers that this is not a data table.
• Your text content should be... text. It may seem obvious, but text in an image is a bad idea.
• Use semantic tags (<p>, <h1>, <h2>, ... ). These tags enable screen readers to identify the hierarchy of information.
• Use sufficient color contrast to make your communication legible. There are tools that will do this for you on the whole email (EmailOnAcid, Litmus, ... ), or you can find free tools on the net.
• Use a large, legible typeface.
• Add a language attribute to your email
• Put alternative text on your images. If an image is not intended to be read, leave the alt attribute empty.

For more details, I refer you once again to Thomas's article or to live rebroadcast we've done on the subject.

To conclude

It's always possible to see the EAA as a constraint. I don't think that's the case. Badsender has long advocated best practices that need to be put in place to ensure clear email communication to the widest possible audience. An email should get a message across before being "pretty". Design supports the message, not the other way around!

E-mails produced by Badsender, except in the case of specific constraints, have long been within the EAA framework. The same applies to emails produced by our email builder LePatron!