When should you use Still works with images off?
email-images-off-legibility · visual · optional
When should you use this check?
Run this on image-led campaigns and on any first send to a new audience. Images blocked is what Outlook shows every recipient who has not added you to Safe Senders, so this is not an edge case — it is the default experience for a meaningful share of business inboxes on the send that matters most. It asks the harder question alt text alone cannot: with images off, does the email still say what it is offering and give the reader a way to act?
When should you not?
Skip it on text-led mail that barely uses imagery, where the answer is obviously yes and the check spends budget confirming it. It is also not a substitute for the alt-text check — that one finds missing and useless alt values across every image cheaply, while this one judges the resulting experience as a whole. If you have not yet fixed known alt-text failures, run that check first: this one will simply tell you the consequence of them.
What does it inspect?
With images blocked — what Outlook shows every recipient who has not added you to their Safe Senders list — the email must still convey what it is offering and give the reader a way to act. Requires the Images have usable ALT text check, which supplies the free half of the same question.
What does a failure mean?
A failure means that with images blocked, the message does not communicate its offer or does not present a usable way to act on it. That is the strongest form of image-dependency finding, because it does not depend on any single asset being broken — the email is working exactly as built and still saying nothing. The recipients affected are precisely the ones least familiar with you, since they are the ones who have not yet marked you as safe.
What are the Standard defaults — and why?
This check has no tunable thresholds. It is a rendered judgement about the message with images blocked, and there is no numeric limit or configurable list that would meaningfully calibrate "does this still communicate" — the answer is holistic by nature. The variables available are which clients and widths you render, which are job settings rather than parameters.
How does an agent call it?
{
"type": "email",
"validations": [
"email-images-off-legibility"
]
}
Who governs the Standard?
Schemafirst.org publishes community-governed standards for digital QA. ArbiterQA is a sponsor and commercial licensee of those standards; citation does not mean Schemafirst operates ArbiterQA.
Author ArbiterQA · Reviewed by ArbiterQA · 2026-08-14