The Email Markup Consortium tested 376,348 HTML emails sent between May 2025 and May 2026 and found that all but eight contained serious or critical accessibility issues.
The failure rate is effectively unchanged from 2025’s 99.89%. EMC calls it a “technical standstill”.
The failures are not exotic
Most of what’s failing is machine-checkable and cheap to fix. Missing dir attributes on the email body: 97.41% of emails. Missing body-level lang: 95.66%. Layout tables without role="presentation" or role="none": 83.78%. Images with no alt text: 47.88%, classified as critical.
Platforms: 100% failure across the board
New this year, EMC audited 10,566 emails sent through Substack, Shopify and Beehiiv. None passed.
- Substack: 6,909 emails tested, 83.77% critical
- Shopify: 1,468 emails tested, 84.67% critical
- Beehiiv: 2,189 emails tested, 46.41% critical, 53.59% serious
Users of these platforms mostly don’t control the markup. EMC notes user choices contribute, but the defaults are doing the heavy lifting here.
Email clients: nobody supports the full spec
EMC expanded its client benchmark from 20 to 37 feature tests covering semantic HTML, ARIA, focus states, user-preference media queries, language and direction attributes. No client supported all 37.
| Client | Score (out of 37) |
|---|---|
| Apple Mail (macOS) | 34 |
| Apple Mail (iOS) | 31 |
| Samsung Email (Android) | 31 |
| Proton Mail (desktop / iOS) | 29 |
| Outlook (Android) | 25 |
| Yahoo Mail (desktop / Android) | 16 |
| Gmail (varies by platform) | 15–17 |
| Yahoo Mail (iOS) | 14 |
| Outlook (Windows) | 11 |
| Windows Mail | 8 |
The benchmark measures how well clients render accessibility features senders use, not the accessibility of the client apps themselves. Senders cannot fully compensate when clients strip or ignore the markup.
Automated testing only goes so far
Testing used Parcel’s accessibility checker. The eight emails that passed automated checks still failed manual review on issues like vague alt text, image-embedded text at unreadable sizes, and decorative imagery with generic alt. EMC sees a role for AI in evaluating alt text quality, link context and design-versus-markup intent, but stops short of calling it a substitute for manual review.
Read the full report here: https://emailmarkup.org/en/reports/accessibility/2026/
