Badsender Joins a11y France: A New Step in Our Commitment to Email Accessibility

For the past 15 years, at Badsender, as a’emailing agency, we are fighting for more responsible emailing. Today, we are proud to announce a new step in this commitment: Badsender is now a member of a11y France, the association that brings together digital accessibility professionals in France.

What is a11y France?

a11y France is a very young 1901 Act association born in 2025, co-founded notably by Ideance, Temesis and Tanaguru, with the support of stakeholders such as the’Valentin Haüy Association. His goal: bring together digital accessibility professionals and stakeholders to build a truly accessible digital world for everyone.

Specifically, the association works to recognize accessibility professions, create dedicated certifications, promote good practices among businesses and institutions, and network all the sector's stakeholders: companies, representative associations, and public bodies.

Why is Badsender joining a11y France?

For us, accessibility is a duty: everyone must be able to view and interact with an email, otherwise a part of the audience is simply excluded, and we find that unacceptable.

Unfortunately, we see it in our design audits: emails almost never comply with accessibility criteria. There is a lot of talk about accessibility for websites, applications, and PDF documents, but email marketing remains largely lagging behind.

Our role, by joining a11y France, will be to contribute even more to raising awareness about accessibility in emails remind that email accessibility exists, and that it should be an integral part of any email strategy.

At Badsender, we’ve been talking about email accessibility since 2022. A new step was taken in 2025, with the entry into force of the European Accessibility Act (EAA), the drafting of a guide to email accessibility best practices, our first participation in the a11y Paris event.

Based on our knowledge, our investigations, and our conversation with Frédéric Halna of Tanaguru and the Valentin Haüy Association during a Badsender livestream, which we built in 2025 our own criteria grid, allowing us to diagnose, very concretely, the accessibility of emails. This grid has 59 criteria, organized by theme (structure, images, colors, tables, etc.) and divided into 3 levels of importance (critical, medium, low) to allow for progressive compliance. For each criterion, a compliance-responsible team is assigned: technical (developers, designers), copywriters, or CRM, so that everyone knows where to act. You can consult a concrete example of an assessment carried out for WWF.

Where do things stand, one year after the EAA?

The European Accessibility Act (EAA) came into effect in June 2025, imposing digital accessibility obligations on many private companies. One year later, where do things stand regarding emails? Our observation, shaped through our email accessibility audits, is that the same mistakes recur almost systematically:

• The lack of a specific structure for the email context and webmail : the body content is not properly wrapped in a main tag that includes the language declaration attributes (lang) and text direction (dir) ;
• The lack of a role presentation regarding the tables used for layout, even though these tables only serve to visually structure the email and not to present data; ;
• The lack of semantic tags on text content, which prevents assistive technologies from understanding the hierarchy and nature of the content; ;
• Non-explicit links, such as «click here» or «learn more», which mean nothing out of context for someone navigating with a keyboard or a screen reader; ;
• Uncontrolled use of attributes alt, left blank, inconsistent, or conversely, far too verbose.

These are the almost systematic stumbling blocks that we find, regardless of the sector or the advertiser's maturity. But these are not the only ones, and one year after the EAA came into force, there is still a long way to go before email becomes a truly accessible channel by default.

One step closer to a healthier ecosystem

Let's be honest: we still don't really know much about the world of digital accessibility. We've only truly been involved in it for the past year, through our livestreams and our participation in the A11y Paris conference. It's an ecosystem with its own standards, its own experts, and its own battles, and we are thrilled to discover it and start finding our place in it.

Joining a11y France gives the Badsender team the opportunity to connect with other professionals: accessibility consultants, auditors, RGAA liaisons, and organizations representing people with disabilities. These meetings allow us to put our respective professions into perspective, learn best practices, and highlight the very specific characteristics of email—aspects that aren’t always understood in the web industry.

We believe that companies must take responsibility for digital technology, and that as an agency, our duty is to educate, demystify, and share knowledge. This is true for deliverability, this is true for digital sobriety, and this is true for accessibility as well.

Want to learn more about our email accessibility approach? Get in touch. Let's talk about it.

The a11y France website: https://a11yfrance.org/