Ed advises Exclaimer on legal exposure and compliance risk, and in this session, walks through where accessibility law actually sits today: which regulations apply, how enforcement is expanding past public-facing websites, and what that means for the emails employees send as part of daily business.
Email accessibility and the law: What your team needs to know before it becomes a problem
For more insights on this webinar, read the blog post.
Most marketing teams have already been through this. A few years ago, email service providers and legal teams forced the issue on marketing email: many CRM platforms will not send a campaign unless it first meets basic accessibility criteria. Employee email, including the email signature every person in the business sends dozens of times a day, has not been through that same process.
Ed Bodey, Exclaimer's General Counsel, and Millie Creswell, who leads CRM and lifecycle marketing at Exclaimer, unpack that gap in this on-demand session. No accessibility law names the email signature directly. The ADA, Section 508, the European Accessibility Act, the UK Equality Act, and their equivalents in Canada and Australia all point back to WCAG as the underlying standard, and enforcement is expanding past public-facing websites into the everyday communications a business sends.
Ed walks through where legal exposure actually sits today, including how private-sector organizations increasingly find themselves in scope through funding conditions and shifting enforcement. Millie brings the first-party view from marketing's own accessibility overhaul: what the team got wrong the first time, why automated defaults for plain text and mobile layouts cannot be trusted without a manual check, and why fixing the email signature is a faster win than fixing an entire website.
Ownership is the question that keeps coming up. IT holds the infrastructure, marketing owns the design, and legal owns the risk, and in most organizations, nobody owns all three at once.
What you'll learn:
Every major accessibility law, including the ADA, Section 508, the European Accessibility Act, and the UK Equality Act, points back to WCAG as the technical baseline, but none of them name the email signature directly.
Enforcement is expanding past public-facing websites into everyday business communications, employee email included.
Building one accessible email signature is straightforward. Keeping thousands of them accessible as people join, leave, and change roles is where compliance actually breaks down.
Most teams already cover alt text and color contrast. Fewer catch QR codes with no alternative access point, or hyperlinks without proper screen reader labels.
A failed accessibility check can hurt email deliverability the same way a spam flag does, on top of the legal and reputational risk.
