Your Website Might Be Turning People Away
Imagine a long-time donor visiting your fundraising page on her tablet. The text is light gray on a white background, and she has to squint to read it. She gives up and closes the tab.
Or picture a blind veteran navigating your services page with a screen reader. Instead of hearing a description of your community programs, he hears "image, image, image" repeated over and over. He has no idea what those images show, and no way to find out.
These are not edge cases. According to the WebAIM Million study, which analyzes the top one million home pages on the web every year, over 96% of home pages have detectable accessibility failures. Nonprofit websites are no exception.
The good news is that the most common issues are well understood, and most of them are straightforward to fix once you know what to look for. This is not about pointing fingers. It is about understanding what your visitors actually experience when they come to your site.
Here are the five most common accessibility issues found across the web, explained in plain language.
1. Low Contrast Text
This is the single most common accessibility issue on the web. The WebAIM Million report found it on over 81% of all home pages tested.
Low contrast means the color of your text is too similar to the color of the background behind it. Light gray text on a white background. Dark blue text on a black background. Subtle color combinations that might look elegant in a design mockup but become unreadable in practice.
The people most affected are visitors with low vision, older adults whose eyesight has changed over time, and anyone trying to read your site on a phone in bright sunlight. That last group alone is a significant portion of your audience.
A donor in her 60s trying to read your annual report on a tablet in a bright room may simply give up. She is not going to email you to say the text was hard to read. She is just going to leave.
The fix is usually a matter of adjusting text and background colors to meet a minimum contrast ratio. Your designer or developer can check this in seconds using free tools, and the visual difference is often barely noticeable while the readability improvement is dramatic.
2. Missing Image Descriptions
When a sighted visitor lands on your website, they see photos of your community, your team, the people you serve. Those images tell a story and build trust.
When a blind or low-vision visitor lands on the same page using a screen reader, they hear each image announced out loud. If the image has a description (called "alt text" in web development), the screen reader reads it: "Volunteers sorting food donations at the annual drive." If the image has no description, the screen reader says "image" and moves on. Or worse, it reads the file name: "DSC_0847.jpg."
A visitor relying on a screen reader who encounters a page full of undescribed images gets no information from them at all. If those images are central to your message, the meaning of the entire page is lost for that visitor.
Missing image descriptions are the second most common accessibility failure on the web. They are also one of the easiest to fix. Each image just needs a short, honest sentence describing what it shows.
3. Unlabeled Form Fields
Your donation form, your volunteer signup, your event registration page. These are the entry points for engagement with your organization. For many nonprofits, they are the most important pages on the entire site.
When a form field has a visible label next to it, sighted users know what to type. "First Name" next to the first box. "Email Address" next to the second. But if those labels are not properly connected to the fields in the underlying code, a screen reader user reaches the form and hears "edit text" with no indication of what information is being requested.
Is it their name? Their email? Their credit card number? There is no way to tell without guessing or tabbing around the page trying to find context clues.
A potential volunteer who cannot figure out what your signup form is asking for is not going to keep trying. They are going to leave your site and find another organization to give their time to.
The fix is a small change in the HTML code that connects each label to its field. It does not change the visual appearance of the form at all, but it makes the form completely usable for people who rely on assistive technology.
4. Empty Links
An empty link is a clickable element that has no text describing where it leads. Sighted users might see a Facebook icon or a right-pointing arrow and understand what it does. But a screen reader user hears "link" with no context about what will happen when they click it.
The most common culprits are social media icon rows. A footer or header with a row of icons for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn where each icon is a link but none of them have accessible names. A screen reader user navigating that section hears: "link, link, link, link." Four identical announcements with no way to distinguish one from another.
The same issue shows up with "read more" links, arrow buttons, and icon-only navigation elements. Any link that relies entirely on a visual icon to communicate its purpose is invisible to someone who cannot see that icon.
The fix is adding a small piece of hidden text (called an "aria-label" or "screen reader only text") that describes the link. The visual design stays exactly the same, but now a screen reader announces "Facebook" or "Read more about our annual gala" instead of just "link."
5. Missing Document Language
This one is invisible to most people, but it has a real effect on how your site sounds to screen reader users.
Every web page is supposed to declare what language it is written in. This is a single line of code at the very top of the page. When it is present, a screen reader knows to use English pronunciation rules for an English page, French pronunciation for a French page, and so on.
When it is missing, the screen reader has to guess. If it guesses wrong, every word on the page is mispronounced. Imagine trying to understand an entire web page being read to you with the wrong language's pronunciation rules. It would be like listening to someone read English words using French phonetics.
For nonprofits serving multilingual communities, this matters even more. If your site has pages in multiple languages, each page needs to declare its language correctly so assistive technology can switch pronunciation rules accordingly.
This is the easiest issue on this list to fix. It is literally one attribute on one line of HTML. But it is also one of the easiest to overlook, which is why it remains one of the top five most common failures year after year.
Why This Matters More for Nonprofits
Every organization should care about web accessibility. But nonprofits have a particular reason to take it seriously.
Your organization exists to serve people. Your mission statement probably says something about inclusion, community, or removing barriers. If your website, the front door to your organization for many visitors, has barriers that prevent people with disabilities from using it, there is a disconnect between your mission and your online presence.
This is not about legal compliance, though accessibility requirements are increasingly part of the regulatory landscape in both Canada and the United States. It is about alignment. If your mission is to include people, your website should not be the thing that excludes them.
There is also a practical benefit worth mentioning. Many of the things that make a website accessible also make it better for search engines. Descriptive image text, clear heading structures, properly labeled forms, and well-organized content are exactly what Google looks for when deciding how to rank your pages. Fixing accessibility issues often improves your SEO at the same time.
What You Can Do About It
Most nonprofits do not have a web developer on staff, and these issues are almost never intentional. They creep in through website templates, third-party plugins, and design choices made by people who were never told about accessibility in the first place. This is not a failure of caring. It is a gap in awareness.
If you want a quick sense of where your site stands, there are free tools you can run yourself. WAVE (wave.webaim.org) and Google Lighthouse (built into the Chrome browser) will both scan a page and flag the most common issues. They will not catch everything, but they will give you a starting point.
If you would rather have someone translate the results into plain language, I am happy to help. I will run a free accessibility check on your site and send you a clear summary of what I find. No jargon, no error codes, no sales pitch. Just a straightforward list of what is affecting your visitors and what can be done about it.
