Left Outside the Donate Button: What Small Charities Owe Disabled Supporters

Most charity websites we look at are, on the surface, perfectly lovely. Warm photography, an earnest strapline, a donate button in a respectable shade of teal. Then you try to use one with a screen reader. Or with the text zoomed to 200%. Or with a tremor in your hands and a gift aid form that resets itself after ninety seconds. The loveliness evaporates pretty quickly.

That gap between how a site looks and how it works is what we've started calling accessibility debt. Not a scandal. Rarely deliberate. Just an accumulation of small decisions made in a hurry by good people with a deadline and no one to ask.

And unlike a visual refresh, it doesn't get fixed by a new colour palette.

The debt doesn't show up in your analytics

Here's the uncomfortable part. Your dashboard will not tell you that someone abandoned your donation page because the 'continue' button was the size of a grain of rice. It won't flag the supporter who couldn't open your annual report because it was a scanned PDF with no text layer. It can't record the person who gave up on your referral form because it asked for the same information three times in language borrowed from a local authority.

People who hit a wall usually just leave. Quietly. Without filling in a feedback widget.

So the numbers look fine, and the debt keeps accruing.

This isn't really about legislation

The Equality Act 2010 has been with us for well over a decade, and it applies to organisations providing services to the public — including charities. There's also the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations, which cover many organisations adjacent to the charity sector even if they don't cover all of them directly. Useful context. Genuinely important.

But we'd gently argue that compliance is the floor, not the point.

Think about who is most likely to need your services. Disabled people are more likely to live in poverty, more likely to be isolated, more likely to be navigating overlapping systems with too few advocates. Roughly a quarter of the UK population is disabled. If your digital front door is hard to open, you're not failing an audit — you're failing a relationship with a group of people you probably exist to serve.

That reframing matters. Accessibility isn't a project with an end date. It's a way of behaving towards people.

Where the debt actually hides

When we run a light-touch review for a charity, the same four pockets turn up again and again.

Content formats. Reports in PDF, event flyers as flat images, videos without captions, infographics that carry the only copy of an important statistic. Every one of those is a locked door for somebody.

Contrast and type. Pale grey body text on white. Thin weights at small sizes. Hero images with text baked in. None of it looks broken to a sighted designer on a big monitor in a bright room.

Donation and sign-up flows. Timeouts, no visible labels on form fields, error messages that say 'invalid input', required fields marked only in colour. This is where the cost is most measurable, because it's where people are trying to give you money.

Procurement blindness. A new CRM, an events platform, a case management system — bought without anyone asking whether it meets WCAG 2.2 AA, or whether the contract includes an accessibility statement and a route to report problems.

That last one is the sneaky one. You can fix your website and still be trapped for five years by a supplier you didn't interrogate.

A 90-day plan that doesn't need a big budget

Days 1–30: Look honestly, and write things down

Start by asking disabled supporters what's actually failing. Not a survey — a conversation, with a thank-you and a payment attached. Two or three people will tell you more than any automated scan.

Alongside that, run a free checker over your ten most-visited pages and your donation journey. Screenshot the failures. Put them in a shared document with an owner next to each one. Then do a content sweep: which PDFs could become a web page? Which videos need captions (auto-generated ones are a start, not a finish)? Which images of text need rewriting in actual text?

And introduce plain English as a house rule, not a preference. Short sentences. Active voice. No 'stakeholder engagement pathways'.

Days 31–60: Fix the money path and the buying habits

Prioritise the donation flow and any form that stands between a person and help. Then run a contrast and zoom test on your core templates — literally zoom to 200% in a browser and see what falls apart.

Meanwhile, write a two-paragraph accessibility clause into every procurement conversation from now on. Ask suppliers: does this meet WCAG 2.2 AA? Who fixes issues, and how fast? Can we export our content if we leave? Do you have an accessibility statement we can see? Those four questions cost nothing and save years.

Days 61–90: Test with people, and build the habit

Go back to the supporters you spoke to in month one. Show them what changed. Ask what's still awkward. Then set a rhythm: an accessibility item in every quarterly comms meeting, a named person who owns it, and a public accessibility statement with a real email address behind it.

Not a task force. Not a working group. Just a habit.

The bit people skip

The temptation is to treat this as a one-off tidy-up, announce it in a newsletter, and move on. Please don't. Your website will drift. New staff will upload scanned PDFs. A new supplier will ship a widget that breaks your forms.

Accessibility is a relationship, which means it needs maintenance, attention and the occasional awkward conversation. AbilityNet and Scope both offer free, practical guidance if you need a starting point. Charity Digital runs regular sessions too.

The visual refresh can wait. The people trying to reach you can't.