HTML email accessibility and usability consultancy.

Paul Airy, the founder of Beyond the Envelope™, ‘fell into’ and ‘fell in love’ with email in 2011.

Soon after starting out he discovered that almost all of the emails landing in his inbox were all image emails, producing a poor experience, on desktop, tablet and mobile devices.

Driven by a desire to make the email experience easy and effortless for email recipients, he began to explore ways in which this could be achieved.

Tackling typography

Given what he’d seen in his own inbox, he began by tackling typography, taking type out of imagery, and turning it into HTML, containing it within the code of an email.

Recognising that this in itself presented challenges for email creatives and coders alike, he wrote his eBook, A Type of Email, to help them overcome those challenges.

The tips and techniques in this eBook have since become commonplace.

Accessibility for all

However, not happy about leaving it there, he asked himself, ‘how can I make it easy and effortless for all recipients to access their emails?’, which led him to explore accessibility in email.

So, in 2015, at the Email Design Conference (Litmus Live), in London, he delivered his first talk on accessibility in email, entitled A Type of Accessibility. In it, he declared, ‘It’s possible to create accessible email’, and walked through how the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) could be applied to email, with examples of how to do so.

He’s since delivered workshops and talks in the UK, Europe, USA and online, on the topic of typography and accessibility in email, most recently at Email Innovations World in Munich, Germany, when he delivered a talk entitled, Gaps in the Guidelines, ahead of the European Accessibility Act, coming to effect on 28 June 2025.

Making accessibility accessible

With that in mind, Paul has launched his own HTML email accessibility audit service, Envelope Accessibility™, to help email creatives and coders find out if their email’s elements are accessible, and conform to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).