Email Newsletter Accessibility Standards

Newsletter readers might not be able to access images in your newsletter because they’re blind or low vision, have images turned off to save bandwidth, or simply have their email client set up that way. Use Emma’s alt-text feature to add 1-2 concise, active voice sentences to explain the main action in any meaningful image. 

A meaningful image is one that adds context to an article or is necessary for understanding the content of the article. An event photo included with an article recapping the event is an example of a meaningful image. A decorative image is something that just adds flair to your page, like a horizontal divider. Emma automatically marks decorative images as decorative, so you just need to focus on the meaningful images.

What are some best practices for alt-text?

• Remember that your department wordmark is a meaningful image. Describe it in alt-text as “Logo for [Department Name]”.
• Don’t begin your alt-text with “Image of” because all screen reading software begins every alt-text announcement with “Image of”.
• Focus on the main content of the image. If your image contains a man lying asleep on a rug in a cozy living room with a polar bear standing over him, don’t describe the wallpaper. Focus on the man and the polar bear.
• Feel free to describe colors with vivid word choices. Many people who are low vision or blind acquired their vision disabilities, which means that they remember (and appreciate) vivid color descriptions. This can mean instead of describing something as “green”, you could describe it as “Kelly green”, “forest green”, “lime”, “chartreuse”, “olive” or other descriptors.
• If your image includes a photo credit or needs to be accompanied by licensing terms (such as for Creative Commons), those details should go in the image caption, not the alt-text.

Pro-tip: Don’t include images of text in your email newsletter, even if you have the text all listed as selectable text elsewhere in the newsletter.

Text, headings, and links need to have a good strong contrast ratio against their background in order to be readable for people with a variety of vision conditions. What’s a “strong contrast ratio”?

• For text that’s smaller than 18-points, it’s 4.5:1. 
• For text that’s at least 18 points or larger OR 14 points AND bold, it’s 3:1.

How do you measure the contrast ratio?

OAS strongly recommends using the TPGi Colour Contrast Analyser. This is a free, industry-standard desktop tool available for both the Mac and Windows platforms. 

To measure contrast, open up the Colour Contrast Analyser and take a sample of your text using the eyedropper icon in the “Foreground colour” bar. Then take a sample of the background color using the eyedropper icon in the “Background colour bar”. The Colour Contrast Analyser will automatically calculate your contrast ratio.

The Colour Contrast Analyser in Action

Meeting color contrast guidelines

Failing color contrast guidelines

Pro Tips

1. If you are working with the colors in the UVM color palette, feel free to use this reference sheet (.pdf) as a quick way to make sure your colors all have strong enough color contrast.
2. Make sure not to use color as the only way to distinguish between different items. For instance, “Click the orange button to register for the course, and click the green button to email us” doesn’t make any sense to people who don’t have access to those colors.
3. Section 508 accessibility guidelines prohibit using a patterned wallpaper, or watermark in a newsletter.

If you insert a list of related items in your newsletter, make sure to use Emma’s list tool to create either bullets or numbers for all of the items on your list.

Here is a bulleted list of related items set up using a list tool:

• Apples
• Bananas
• Pears
• Starfruit
• Coconut

A screen reader will announce this properly laid out list as: “List: item: apple, item: bananas, item: pears, item: starfruit, item: coconut. End list.”

And here’s a bulleted list of related items set up without using a list tool:

*Apples

*Bananas

*Pears

*Starfruit

*Coconut

A screen reader will not announce these items as a related list. (Test this for yourself, using Jaws, NVDA, Orca, or VoiceOver.)

Emma allows you to embed videos in your newsletters, as well as linking out to them if they’re on YouTube, Vimeo, Streaming UVM, or another video hosting platform. 

When you include video content in either of these ways, make sure if your video has spoken dialogue, it also has fully accurate closed captions. 

• Closed captions are captions you can turn on or off. Closed captions are accessible when they are 100% fully accurate.
• Open captions are ones that are burned right into the video; you can’t get rid of them. Open captions are not accessible.

If your video has no spoken dialogue (such as a highlight reel), it needs audio description. Audio description is an optional audio track where a narrator describes the action taking place in the video for people who are blind or low vision.

An example of audio description

The Office of Accessibility Services provides free fully accurate captions and audio description tracks to all UVM departments, staff, faculty, and students. You do not need to have a disability in order to request this service. You can request captions and audio description services online.

Headings help people who are navigating using a screen reader, or via a keyboard (with no mouse), or other assistive technology. They let assistive technology users skim the different sections and move quickly from one section to the next. 

The templates in Emma have been set up with the headings already done for you. Feel free to leave the headings to their default settings in the template. If you must make changes to them, make sure that:

• You always have one and only one H1 in your newsletter.
• All headings are nested. This means that H3 comes after H2, which comes after H1. Headings should also not skip levels. That means you shouldn’t put an H4 heading right after an H3 heading.

When you think of "nesting" headings, picture matryoshka dolls, wooden nesting doll toys where each doll is uniformly smaller than the next, so that they can be put away in one order only: each doll fits precisely inside the next larger doll.

If you add a table to your newsletter, use Emma’s table tool. This will let you insert a table in your newsletter that automatically specifies a header row. Your header row will read “Add header text”. All other rows will read “Add text”.

What should a table look like in emma?

What should a table contain in an email newsletter?

• Tables in email newsletters should only contain data. Don’t use them to create decorative layouts using columns. If you need columns, use the pre-set columns block in the UVM newsletter template in Emma.
• Don’t put images in tables.
• Don’t nest tables. This means that you shouldn’t put a small table inside a larger table.
• Don’t add images of tables to your newsletter. Only use Emma’s table tool.
• Don’t leave empty cells in a table. Instead, if you have an empty cell in your table, add “N/A” or “Not Applicable”. You want to do this because screen readers can sometimes simply stop reading a table midway through if they encounter an empty cell.

Pro-tips

Avoid putting two tables one right after another. If tables are laid out this way in an email, users with mobility issues or who are using assistive technology for mobility may have difficulty navigating between the tables, and screen readers may also be unable to move from one table to the next.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) have a requirement for animations: if you’re going to include an animation, it needs to be controllable by the user. The user should be able to stop it and start it. 

Email is an exception to this rule. The federal Section 508 guidelines specify that you cannot include animations in email newsletters at all. You cannot add them to your newsletters.

For links in your newsletter, describe the destination to the reader. Instead of using “click here”, or “read more”, describe the destination in the body of the link. 

Instead of: “Click here to register”, use “Online registration now open”. That way the user knows exactly what page the link goes to.

Pro-tips

When linking to any object that is not a webpage, specify the type of object being linked to, especially if it may trigger a download. 

This means that if you’re linking to a .pdf,  a .docx, an .xlsx, or a .pptx file, indicate the file type in parentheses after the link. It does not need to be part of the actual link. 

If you’re linking to a video or audio, put (video) or (audio) after the link. Again, that does not need to be part of the actual link.

For instance, instead of “OAS Newsletter” use something like “OAS April 2026 Newsletter”, or “Summer Digital Accessibility Course Registration now open”. This will make your email more easily searchable in a reader’s email client, whether a user is searching visually, with a browser- or software-based search tool, or by using assistive technology, such as a screen reader.

If you’d like feedback on the accessibility of your newsletter, please reach out to the UVM Office of Accessibility Services. The Office of Accessibility Services provides free newsletter audits to all UVM departments and student organizations. You do not need to have a documented disability in order to take advantage of this service.

To contact the Office of Accessibility Services, you can email access@uvm.edu, or you can phone (802) 656-7753, or you can fill out their online contact form.