For a charity, accessibility is not a compliance checkbox — it is part of the mission. The people you serve include those with visual, motor, hearing and cognitive impairments, and a site they cannot use excludes them at the worst possible moment: when they are looking for help or trying to give.
WCAG 2.2 AA is the standard to aim for. It sounds technical, but most of it comes down to a handful of practical habits. Here is what it means in practice, and where charity sites most often fall short.
Why charities especially can’t skip it
Excluding disabled supporters from giving, or disabled beneficiaries from accessing help, undermines the very thing a charity exists to do. Accessibility also widens your reach and protects credibility with funders and the public — and for many public-facing bodies it is a legal requirement. It is the right thing and the effective thing at once.
The W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative is the definitive reference if you want to go deeper on any point below.
Colour and contrast
Text must have enough contrast against its background to be readable, and you must never rely on colour alone to convey meaning — an error shown only in red is invisible to many users. These are among the most common and most fixable failures:
- Check text contrast meets the AA ratio
- Pair colour with an icon, label or text (not colour on its own)
- Don’t hide critical state (errors, required fields) in colour alone
Keyboard and focus
Everything that works with a mouse must work with a keyboard alone, in a logical order, with a visible focus indicator so users can see where they are. Donation forms and navigation are where this matters most — and, not coincidentally, where it most often breaks. Try it yourself: unplug the mouse and tab through your donation flow.
Alt text and media
Meaningful images need descriptive alt text; decorative ones should be marked so screen readers skip them. Video benefits from captions and, ideally, a transcript. This is straightforward to get right at build time and genuinely tedious to retrofit across an existing site later.
Forms that everyone can complete
Since the donation form is your most important page, its accessibility is non-negotiable — a point we stress in donation form design. Every form needs:
- A clear, programmatically associated label on each field
- Errors described in text, not just colour or an icon
- Instructions that don’t depend on placeholder text alone
Structure and headings
A logical heading hierarchy and proper landmarks let screen-reader users navigate quickly instead of wading through everything linearly. Good structure also happens to help SEO — the same discipline pays twice.
Build it in, don’t bolt it on
Accessibility is far cheaper and far better when designed in from the start, which is why we treat it as a launch requirement in the charity website launch guide and across our charity web design work. It’s also central to what UK mosques need from a website, where the community spans every age and ability.
Want an accessibility review of your current site? Get in touch and we’ll audit it against WCAG 2.2 AA.
