Bahama Buck’s builds its emails out of images. They still read perfectly with the images off.

Turn off images in an email client and most promotional email changes shape. The photos disappear, the headline that lived inside a photo disappears with them, and what is left is whatever the brand wrote into each image’s alt text.

For a lot of readers, that is the email. Some mail clients block images by default. Screen readers speak the alt text aloud. A slow connection on a phone in a parking lot shows the text long before it shows the pictures.

Bahama Buck’s, the shaved ice chain, builds its emails almost entirely from images. With the images off, its emails still read like finished emails, because every image carries a description written for a person.

We tried to join more than 300 quick service and fast casual email, loyalty, and lifecycle programs by hand, using one identity and one inbox, and we measured accessibility across a large sample of the emails that arrived. This post is about the brands that get it right, starting with the best example we found.

What Bahama Buck’s writes

Here is the alt text on the hero image of its fall menu email, verbatim:

Two Bahama Buck’s Sno cups on an orange autumn-themed background. The top Sno is Cinnamon with Tropic Creme. The bottom Sno is Caramel Apple. Text above reads ‘FALL INTO FLAVOR! Discover Our Autumn-Inspired Sno Lineup!’ with an ‘Order Now’ button.

And the hero on its catering email:

Bahama Buck’s Catering promotional graphic featuring a customizable party pack with shaved ice, flavor bottles, toppings, and the message, ‘Customize Your Party Pack for your next event!’

Three things make these work, and all three are easy to copy.

1. They describe what the picture shows. Not “hero image” or “fall promo,” but the actual products, the flavors, and the setting.
2. They carry the words that live inside the image. A headline baked into a graphic is invisible to a screen reader unless someone types it out. Bahama Buck’s types it out, word for word.
3. They name the call to action. “With an ‘Order Now’ button” tells a reader who cannot see the button that there is something to do next.

The result is an email that works the same way for everyone who opens it, whether they see the pictures or not.

The category is better at this than its reputation suggests

Alt text has a poor reputation in email marketing, and we expected to confirm it. The numbers pointed the other way.

Across 948 images in the welcome emails we measured, 95 percent were handled correctly: either described, or correctly marked as decorative so a screen reader skips them. Only 5 percent carried junk or no alt text at all. Promotional email did slightly better, with 82 percent of images described, which suggests modern email platforms are prompting marketers to fill the field when the image is the message.

Where alt text does go wrong, it goes wrong in a small group. The defects we logged were concentrated in about two dozen brands rather than spread across the category, and they fall into a few recognizable shapes: a file name dropped into the alt field, the word “logo” on every image, or a tracking link where a description should be. Each one is a template setting, and each one is a single fix.

Why this matters beyond accessibility

Accessibility is reason enough, but good alt text also pays off in places marketers watch more closely.

• The inbox preview. When a brand leaves the preheader empty, many mail clients fill the preview line with the first text in the email, which is often an image’s alt text. A written description makes a decent preview. A file name makes a strange one.
• Offers stay visible. An offer that lives only inside an image disappears when images are blocked. Alt text that repeats the offer keeps it in front of the reader.
• Design freedom. Bahama Buck’s shows that an image-led email is a legitimate design choice. The alt text is what makes that choice safe.

How to check your own emails in five minutes

• Turn images off and read the email. In most desktop clients this is a single setting. If the message still makes sense, you are in good shape.
• Read every alt attribute in the HTML. Look for file names, the words “image” or “logo,” and URLs. Any of those means the field was never written by a person.
• Check that headline text inside images appears in the alt text. If the most important sentence in the email lives in a graphic, it needs to live in the alt text too.
• Mark decorative images as decorative. Dividers, spacers, and background flourishes should carry an empty alt attribute so screen readers skip them rather than announcing them.
• Look at your inbox preview. Send a test to yourself on a phone and read the preview line before you open the email.

The takeaway

The difference between an image-heavy email that works and one that falls apart is a few sentences of description per image. Bahama Buck’s writes those sentences every time, on every send we measured. It is proof that the fix is a choice, not a platform limit.