Email Accessibility Check
Find the accessibility problems in every email template you send, before you send it.
What it does
Point it at your templates (links, pasted HTML or uploaded files) and get a report for each one: what's wrong, how serious it is, and the line and element to fix. It catches the problems that most often lock people out of an email: images with no alt text, grey-on-grey text, a missing language tag, and layout tables that screen readers read out as data. It checks a whole batch in one run, so you can audit a template library or re-check everything after a redesign.
What you get
- A report per template that names the element, the line and the fix, such as "Contrast 2.11:1 (#a8aaaf on #f2f4f6); needs 4.5:1."
- 14 checks built for email, including ones general web scanners skip: layout tables without
role="presentation", text under 14px, long runs of capitals and a missing preheader. - Colour contrast worked out with the WCAG formula, with the ratio and both colours shown, so your designer can pick a passing shade.
- Up to 500 templates in one run, one row each, exportable to CSV, Excel or JSON or into a build pipeline.
- A "Not checked" list in every report, so you know what still needs a person to look at it.
Example: four fixes and the report is clean
| Finding | Line | Fix |
|---|---|---|
No language tag on <html> | 2 | Add lang="en" |
Empty <title> | 9 | Describe the email in the title |
| Contrast 2.11:1 (#A8AAAF on #F2F4F6) | 464, 565 | Darken to #6B6E76 (4.63:1) |
| Text is 13px | 549, 550, 565 | Raise to 14px |
Best for
- Hand-coded HTML, MJML output, and templates exported from Mailchimp, SendGrid, Postmark, Mailgun and similar platforms, checked before a send or a client hand-over.
- Teams with more than a handful of templates, or anyone who wants results in a file rather than on screen.
Not for
- A compliance certificate. It runs a fixed list of automated checks; whether alt text is accurate, reading order in each email program and dark-mode colours still need a person.
- A rendering preview. It reads your HTML; it doesn't show how Outlook or Gmail will display it.
Cost and how to start
- Open it on Apify Store and sign in, or create a free Apify account.
- Give it links to your templates, pasted HTML, or uploaded HTML files and start the run.
- Download a report for each template, or all the results as a spreadsheet.
Free while launching. Apify charges its own small usage fee to your account: under US$0.001 for a five-template run when we tested it.
Questions
- Does this make my emails WCAG or EAA compliant?
- No tool can promise that. It finds a defined set of problems that can be checked automatically and tells you what it couldn't check, so you know what's left for a manual review.
- Can I use it with my email platform's templates?
- Yes, if you can get the final HTML: a public link, pasted HTML or uploaded files. Merge tags such as *|FNAME|* or {{name}} are left as they are and don't cause errors.
How we tested it
- Popular starter templates all had problems. Of the 105 hand-coded starter templates tested, 101 had no language tag, 71 had text below the WCAG contrast minimum, 48 had images with no alt text (181 images in all) and 43 had no title. Many teams copy these as their starting point.
- It agrees with axe-core. We ran it side by side with axe-core, a widely used open-source checker, on 133 templates. They flagged the same templates for low contrast, and on the hand-coded ones also for missing alt text, language and title.
- It catches planted mistakes. We planted 616 known mistakes in 105 templates, one at a time. It found all but two, and those two were hidden by the template's own CSS.