A few years ago, a blind man called Bruce Lindsay Maguire tried to buy tickets to the Sydney Olympic Games. He went to the website, like everyone else. But unlike everyone else, he couldn’t use it. The site didn’t work with his screen reader, and no accessible alternative was available. Bruce took the organisers to court. He won.

The judge noted Bruce’s ‘considerable feelings of hurt, humiliation and rejection’. That phrase has stuck with me ever since, because it captures something important. When someone can't use your website, the barrier isn’t just practical. It’s personal. And for charities, whose whole purpose is to include and support people, that should land differently than it does for a commercial brand.

I run a digital studio called Few and Far. We work exclusively with UK charities, and accessibility is part of every project we take on. What I want to share in this piece is what we’ve learned about how accessibility affects the supporter experience, particularly around giving, and what fundraisers can do about it without needing a big budget or a technical background.

The overlap most charities miss

When accessibility comes up in conversation, people tend to think about permanent disabilities. And yes, those matter enormously. There are 16.8 million disabled people in the UK according to the most recent Family Resources Survey. Two and a half million are partially sighted. And three million people are colourblind – that’s one in 12 men and one in 200 women.

But the group affected by poor web accessibility is much wider than that. It includes someone with a broken wrist who can’t use a mouse for six weeks. A supporter reading your appeal on the bus, squinting at their phone in bright sunlight. A parent who has thirty seconds of attention before the toddler needs them again. An older donor, loyal for years, whose eyesight has slowly changed. The charity sector’s most valuable supporters – long-term, committed, often older – are disproportionately likely to be affected by the very accessibility issues that charities overlook.

According to Scope, 73 per cent of disabled online consumers encounter barriers on more than a quarter of the websites they visit. In 2024, less than five per cent of the world’s top one million websites were fully accessible. Charity websites are not exempt from this.

What does it look like when things go wrong?

I’ll give you a few examples, some from our own work with charities and some from the wider sector, because these patterns repeat everywhere.

The donation form nobody tested with a keyboard. Not everyone uses a mouse. Plenty of people navigate websites using the Tab key, either because of a visual impairment, a motor disability, or a temporary injury. When we audit charity websites, one of the first things we do is put the mouse away and try to complete a donation by keyboard alone. It’s remarkable how often the experience falls apart. 

Fields get skipped. The focus jumps somewhere unexpected. You can’t tell which element is selected. The supporter doesn’t complain. They just leave. Amazon had a version of this problem for years with their search filters, where keyboard users simply couldn’t reach certain fields. If one of the world’s biggest websites can get this wrong, it’s worth checking yours.

The tribute that made a website unusable. When Prince Philip died, National Rail ‘greyscaled’ their entire website as a mark of respect. In doing so, they removed the colour contrast that partially sighted users depended on to navigate the site. The intention was thoughtful. The effect was exclusion. 

We see a subtler version of this on charity sites all the time, pale text on light backgrounds, donate buttons that barely stand out from the page, error messages that are almost invisible. The technical standard says you need a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text. A lot of charity sites don’t meet it, and the people most affected are often the most loyal supporters.

The carousel that moves too fast. Many charity homepages feature a rotating banner, cycling through campaigns, appeals and impact stories on a timer. Most of these give you a few seconds per slide. If you need longer to read, whether because of a cognitive condition, a visual impairment, or because English isn’t your first language, the content moves on before you’re done. Most carousels don't have a visible pause button. Childline’s website is one we’ve looked at where even a confident reader would struggle with the timing and the location of the pause button.

The support site that triggers rather than helps. This one matters hugely for charities working in sensitive areas. We’ve seen the Alcoholics Anonymous UK homepage feature an image of someone drinking. We’ve seen domestic abuse sites with imagery that could re-traumatise the very people seeking help. 

If your charity supports vulnerable people, your website might be the first place someone turns in a crisis. The images you choose, the language you use, even features like newsletter sign-ups that could send emails to a shared household, all of it needs thinking through from the user’s perspective, not the marketing teams.

What does ‘good’ design look like?

It’s easy to focus on what’s broken. But accessible design doesn’t mean stripping everything back to plain text on a white page.

When we built the website for M2, we wanted to prove that point. It’s a visually strong, well-designed site that also meets Level AA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, the standard most organisations should aim for. 

Now, it has good colour contrast, logical keyboard navigation, proper heading structures, and content that reads well through a screen reader. None of that came at the expense of the design. It enhanced it. The site is easier to use for everyone, not just people with disabilities, and that’s the part charities sometimes find surprising.

The government’s own GOV.UK site is another good reference point. It was designed from the ground up to be accessible to almost all users, with customisable colours, full keyboard navigation, and clean content structure. You don’t have to go that far, but it shows what’s possible when accessibility is treated as a design principle rather than an afterthought.

Four top tips fundraisers can try today 

You might be thinking that this is a job for the web team, not the fundraising team. And yes, the technical fixes need a developer. But fundraisers are often the people best placed to spot the problems and make the case for fixing them, because you understand what a lost donation actually costs.

Here are four things you can do this week, none of which require a budget or technical skills.

1. Try donating to your own charity using just the keyboard. Tab, Enter, arrow keys. No mouse. See if you can get through the whole process. If you get stuck, flag exactly where, and take that to your digital team.
2. Check the contrast on your donate button. WebAIM (Web Accessibility In Mind) has a free contrast checker. Plug in the text colour and background colour. If it fails the 4.5:1 ratio, that’s a concrete, evidence-based reason to request a change. We even built our own colour contrast tool at Few and Far because we use it so often.
3. Listen to your donation page through a screen reader. NVDA (Non-Visual Desktop Access) is free on Windows. VoiceOver is already on every Mac and iPhone. Turn it on and try to navigate your giving page. Ten minutes will teach you more than any report.
4. Look at your next email appeal with fresh eyes. Does every image have alt text, a short, written description that screen readers announce in place of the image? If a photo is central to your emotional case for giving, the alt text should carry that weight. If it’s decorative, mark it as such. And write your alt text yourself rather than relying on AI (artificial intelligence). You know what the image is supposed to make the reader feel.

A few things to remember

This is one ‘solution’ to avoid. Charities get sold accessibility overlay tools constantly. Products like AccessiBe and UserWay promise to fix everything with a single plug-in. They don’t. 

These are the digital equivalent of a ‘stramp’, a combined staircase and ramp that looks like it solves the problem but actually works for nobody. In practice, overlays can make things worse for people who use assistive technology. If you have any budget at all, spend it on genuine improvements, even small ones, rather than a badge in the corner of the screen.

Start with your donation page. If your charity website has accessibility issues, don’t panic. It’s not unusual. Almost all of them do. The point isn’t perfection. It’s progress.

Recently, we ran a webinar on this topic called ‘A Web for All’, and 86 people from across the sector signed up, including staff from CoppaFeel!, Refuge, the NHS and Parkinson’s UK. Like you, your sector peers want to get this right. And what stops you is usually confidence, not willingness.

So, pick one page. I’d start with the donation page, because that’s where the supporter experience and your fundraising income overlap most directly. Run it through a free tool like WAVE or Lighthouse in Google Chrome. Don’t panic if it flags a lot of errors. Fixing one underlying issue often clears dozens of them.

Your supporters are already trying to give. Don’t let your website accessibility be the thing that stops them.

IMAGES ©: Few and Far

Few and Far is a B Corp certified digital studio based in Leeds that works exclusively with UK charities. Few and Far provides free digital skills mentoring for smaller charities through Media Trust and has produced a free Websites Unlocked Toolkit for charities looking to improve their websites.