Nonprofit accessibility best practices

Why accessibility matters for nonprofits

Accessibility is mission-aligned by definition. If your organization exists to serve everyone in your community, your website has to hold up its end for donors using screen readers, volunteers navigating by keyboard, program participants with low vision, and staff with motor or cognitive disabilities. Together, those visitors make up a meaningful share of the audience most nonprofits serve.

The practical case is just as strong. The habits that make a site accessible (clear headings, legible text, honest link labels, forms that explain themselves) make it easier for every visitor to donate, sign up, or find a program. The same clean structure also helps search engines and AI crawlers parse your pages, so the work tends to pay for itself in visibility.

There’s a legal dimension too, and it’s worth stating carefully: courts have increasingly applied the ADA to websites, organizations receiving federal funding may carry Section 508 obligations, and EN 301 549 sets the bar for much of Europe. All of these point toward the same practical target: WCAG 2.1 AA.

The checklist, grouped by who owns it

Most accessibility failures trace back to one of three places: the content your team publishes, the design decisions baked into your templates, and the code underneath. When each item has a clear owner, the list below is far more likely to get used after launch.

Content: what your editors own

Design: what your designers own

Code: what your developers own

Two myths worth retiring

Myth one: an overlay widget makes you compliant. Overlay tools promise accessibility in one line of code, but they change how a page presents, not what it is. They can’t write missing alt text, repair a broken heading outline, or label an unlabeled form — and some actively interfere with the assistive technology people already have configured. Until those underlying issues are fixed, visitors who rely on that technology will keep hitting the same barriers.

Myth two: one audit fixes it forever. An audit describes your site on the day it was run, and sites change constantly. Every new page, image, embed, or plugin can introduce regressions: a missing label here, a skipped heading there. Staying accessible depends on the publishing habits your team follows once the audit is done.

Who’s responsible: editors or developers?

Both, at different layers. Developers own the templates and components. Get a form field, a card, or a navigation menu right once, and every page that uses it inherits the fix. Editors own everything that changes week to week: images, headings, links, and embeds. In our experience, most post-launch regressions come from content changes rather than from the underlying code, which is why editor training belongs in any serious accessibility plan.

Someone also has to own the standard itself. Name WCAG 2.2 AA as your baseline, write it into your publishing checklist, and decide who signs off before new pages go live. Without a named owner, those checks tend to get skipped once deadlines pile up.

Keep it accessible over time

Build small checks into every publish: alt text present, headings in order, links descriptive. Schedule a fuller review a few times a year, and retest after anything structural: a redesign, a migration, a new donation platform. When staff turn over, train the next editor before their first post goes live.

We’ve worked exclusively with nonprofits since 2007 (more than 1,000 organizations), and our IAAP-certified team builds to WCAG 2.2 AA by default. If you want a second set of eyes on your site, that’s a conversation we have every week.