What You'll Learn
- Web accessibility allows people with disabilities to more easily use your website, but all visitors benefit from it.
- The W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative provides resources and guidance to help you make your website more accessible to all.
- Free tools exist that will help you evaluate your website with accessibility in mind.
Nonprofit organizations serve every constituency, many often ignored by other sectors, including people with disabilities. Regardless of your organization’s mission, your website needs to be accessible to everyone. This guide provides practical tips that you can use on your website right now to make it work better for all your visitors.
What Is Web Accessibility?
Web accessibility is a set of standards, practices, and features of a website that allow users to navigate the web with screen readers, screen magnifiers, hands-free mouse interfaces, and other assistive devices.
Accessible websites have flexibility built in so that people with auditory, cognitive, physical, speech, and visual disabilities can use them equitably.
The classic example is making images accessible to people who cannot see them. For each image, you provide the important information in a text description, known as "alt text." It's in the code, so most people don't see it. When a visually impaired person uses a screen reader, it can read aloud the description to the user or send it to the user's dynamic braille device.
“An accessible website is designed and developed so that people with disabilities can perceive, navigate, understand, and interact with the website,” says Shawn Lawton Henry, director of the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).
“For example, the website works for an older user with low vision, decreased hearing, cognitive decline, and hand tremors. The text contrast is high enough that they can read the text on the background color; the site works with their large text settings; there are captions for any audio; and all the interaction is available via the keyboard, since they cannot use a mouse.”
A collection of international standards, known as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), are set by the WAI, a group within the World Wide Web Consortium, which maintains broader web standards of HTML, CSS, and other technologies. WAI offers guidance for writers, designers, developers, and other web creators to ensure that what they create is accessible for all users.
Why Web Accessibility Is Important
Improving a website’s accessibility allows visitors that use assistive technologies to more easily view, use, or navigate the site. An accessible website is a crucial piece of infrastructure for a nonprofit organization because it demonstrates that organization’s commitment to making its services available to everyone, regardless of their ability to see a screen or otherwise engage with the site.
Taken together, that is a nontrivial portion of the population. According to the CDC, nearly 29 percent of U.S. adults have a disability of some sort.
For nonprofits, accessibility also means that your website benefits users whom your organization may focus on: older people, people in rural areas or in developing countries with less reliable internet connections, and people who may not be as fluent in the website’s language.
“When websites are accessible, people with disabilities can use them equitably,” says Henry. “I have blind friends and colleagues who are faster than I am at many website tasks. However, if you don't deliberately address accessibility, your website probably has barriers that make it difficult or impossible for some people to use your website. You risk frustrating and excluding some of your core beneficiaries, constituents, recipients, donors, and other stakeholders.”
“Accessibility is essential for some and useful for all,” he says.
Beyond the ease of use with assistive technologies, these standards also have other benefits, including:
- A smoother user experience: Meeting minimum standards for color contrast, font size, and line spacing makes for a more pleasant experience for all users, which can increase the time users spend on your site and how likely they are to return.
- Increased SEO: Including descriptions for images and other on-page elements provides more text for search engine crawlers and generative AI systems to process, which increases the likelihood that users will find your content when they search.
- A wholistic approach: An accessibility review is a healthy practice for evaluating the layout and information architecture of your site. By inspecting where elements are placed on the page and the paths users take throughout, you can discover gaps or technical issues that would otherwise go unnoticed.
How to Evaluate the Accessibility of Your Website
The good news is you don’t have to hand-inspect each line of HTML on your site. Instead, start with one of the many accessibility review sites available online.
- web.dev: Google’s PageSpeed Insights scans any publicly accessible page for performance, SEO, and overall best practice, but it also includes an accessibility report. This report provides recommendations for common accessibility fixes, like alt text, which inform screen readers of the contents of an image, and Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) roles, which signal the contents and purpose of on-page elements to assistive technologies. Google also provides information on improving sites’ accessibility.
- WAVE/AIM: Utah State University launched the Web Accessibility in Mind (WebAIM) project in 2001, which includes a scanner similar to PageSpeed Insights, but WebAIM’s web accessibility evaluation (WAVE) tool also features an interactive snapshot of your site that highlights errors and other alerts that can prevent users from interacting with your site. WebAIM also offers other evaluation tools including browser extensions and a contrast checker to make sure that text remains legible at any foreground or background color.
How to Improve Your Nonprofit Website’s Accessibility
The steps you take to make your site more accessible will depend greatly on its current makeup, including the technologies behind it and the contents of it. However, these steps will provide a good start if you’re new to web accessibility.
- Explore your CMS: Look at which content management system (CMS) your site uses. Modern CMSes like WordPress and Wix include common accessibility functionality, like automatically assigning WAI-ARIA roles to on-page elements to inform screen readers if they are interactive or cosmetic. Find out which system your site is on and look into its accessibility features.
- Scan key pages: Scan your home page and other top-level, critical pages with PageSpeed Insights and WAVE. Critical issues often appear on every page because elements that lack necessary accessibility information or have low-contrast colors are part of a template used throughout the site.
- Use a screen reader: Software like NVDA for Windows or macOS’s built-in VoiceOver feature narrate on-screen text, including within web browsers. Browsers like Chrome and Firefox also feature caret browsing (enable or disable with F7), which allows a user to navigate text using only keyboard arrows. Browser extensions provide other accessibility features not available by default. Even if you don’t personally need these to browse your site, enabling them gives you a valuable perspective into what the experience is like for those who do.
- Consult online resources: Google, WAI, and WebAIM offer many resources to explain the finer points of web accessibility and general guidelines for making sites available to everyone. Section 508 from the U.S. federal government also includes information on standards for content production and consumption beyond just public services. All of these resources can deepen your knowledge of how to improve your site’s functionality.
- Test with users: There are many ways to conduct user testing, but even basic tests can reveal a lot. Watch a user who wouldn’t normally engage with your site, such as a family member, in person or over an online call. Give them a basic task and see how they navigate. Even if they don’t use accessibility technologies, those tests can reveal friction in your UX, and what’s difficult for average users may be more difficult for users with screen readers. If you’re able, these tests can be doubly useful with such users.
Additional Resources
The WAI website includes resources for everyone, including managers, designers, and developers.
“Start with understanding the basics of how people with disabilities use the web,” says Henry. “While it is important to meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), the international standard from the W3C, WCAG is not a starting point for learning about accessibility.”
A few resources Henry recommends include:
