#apple mail

Email is still central to most businesses. On a Mac, Outlook provides a more structured and reliable way to manage communication than basic or consumer email platforms. (more…)

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/html-email-accessibility-report-2025/

HTML Email Accessibility Report 2025

Some weekend reading on the heels of Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAADM), which took place yesterday. The Email Markup Consortium (EMC) released its 2025 study on the accessibility in HTML emails, and the TL;DR is not totally dissimilar from what we heard from WebAIM’s annual web report:

This is the third full year for this report and we are disappointed to see the same issues as we have in previous years. The top 10 issues haven’t changed order since last year, apart from the addition of color contrast, which can be put down to a change in the testing and reporting.

The results come from an analysis of 443,585 emails collected from the past year. According to EMC, only 21 emails passed all accessibility checks — and they were all written by the same author representing two different brands. And, further, that author represents one of the companies that not only sponsors the study, but develops the automated testing tool powering the analysis.

Automated testing is the key here. That’s needed for a project looking at hundreds of thousands of emails, but it won’t surface everything, as noted:

Email that pass our checks may still have accessibility issues that we cannot pick up through automated testing. For example, we check if an alt attribute is present on an image, but we do not check if the text is suitable for that image in the context of that message.

The most common issues relate to internationalization, like leaving out the lang (96% of emails) and dir (98% of emails) attributes. But you’ll be familiar with most of what rounds up the top 10, because it lines up with WebAIM’s findings:

Links must have discernible text

Element has insufficient color contrast

Images must have alternate text

Link text should be descriptive

Links must be distinguishable without relying on color

I appreciate that the report sheds a light on what accessibility features are supported by specific email clients, such as Gmail. The report outlines a set of 20 HTML, CSS, and ARIA features they look for and found that only one email client (SFR Mail?) of the 44 evaluated supports all of the features. Apple Mail and Samsung Email are apparently close behind, but the other 41? Not so much.

AilSo, yeah. Email has a ways to go, like a small microcosm of the web itself.

Apple’s venerable Mail app has received its biggest redesign ever with the releases of iOS 18.2. While the mailbox screen remains familiar, opening an inbox reveals significant visual and functional changes. Ryan Christoffel for 9to5Mac: ‎ Aesthetically, Apple is now emphasizing contact photos for senders as part of your inbox. Where you used to just see a bunch of text, now there’s color and…

Apple’s revamped Mail app in iOS 18.2 offers a fresh look and feel. While the mailbox screen remains familiar, opening an inbox reveals significant visual and functional updates. Ryan Christoffel for 9to5Mac: ‎ Aesthetically, Apple is now emphasizing contact photos for senders as part of your inbox. Where you used to just see a bunch of text, now there’s color and imagery to go with it.…