Exclaimer Meets Accessibility Requirements for E-Signatures

Exclaimer, a provider of email signature management solutions, today launched Accessibility Controls, a collection of functionalities within Exclaimer that teams can use to ensure templates satisfy 28 WCAG 2.1 Level AA accessibility criteria for email signature content.

The U.S. Department of Justice's ADA Title II rule requires state and local government web content and mobile apps to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA, with entities serving populations of 50,000 or more required to comply by April 26, 2027, and smaller entities and special district governments by April 26, 2028. Separately, organizations receiving U.S. Department of Health and Human Services funding with 15 or more employees have until May 11, 2027, to bring web content and mobile apps into conformance with WCAG 2.1 Level AA under Section 504, while smaller recipients have until May 10, 2028.

"Accessibility programs almost always start with the website," said Paul Hammond, chief product and technology officer of Exclaimer, in a statement. "Email signatures get missed because nobody thinks of them as digital content, but they are, and they appear in thousands of everyday business communications. With Accessibility Controls, IT can set the standard once, at the template level, instead of asking every employee to fix their own signature."

Exclaimer's Accessibility Controls cover the following four capabilities inside the signature designer:

1. Semantic structure. Signatures are built and output as structured, readable content rather than a table, so screen readers announce information in the order it's laid out.
2. Screen reader (ARIA) labels. Interactive elements like hyperlinks can carry a descriptive label, so a screen reader says "Book a demo with our team" instead of "link."
3. Language declaration. Signatures can declare their languages so screen readers use correct pronunciation, useful for organizations sending signatures in more than one language.
4. Clickable QR codes. QR codes in a signature are made more clickable, giving recipients who can't or don't want to scan a code a working path to the same destination.

These sit alongside existing controls: alt text set centrally at the template level, Brand Kits that keep approved color combinations and accessible fonts at or above WCAG's minimum 4.5:1 contrast ratio for standard text, and text that renders as real HTML rather than an image, so it can be resized and read aloud.

Set at the template level, Exclaimer's Accessibility Controls apply across an organization's email signatures in Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace as soon as a template is published.