The accessible websites charities say they believe in, yet rarely build.

Imagine the scene

A blind man opens a charity’s donation page on his phone. He’s navigating with a screen reader, and it reads out “button” three times before it finds the one that actually submits his donation payment. He gives up. He was only trying to donate money to the charity.

That charity exists to help people with disabilities. Yet its own website just shut one out.

Sadly, this isn’t a one-off. TASK Agency tested 60 UK charity websites against WCAG 2.1 AA in August 2026. Forty seven of those charities recorded one or more automated failures.

Note: We tested against 2.1 because that’s what the automated tooling checks most reliably; nearly all of WCAG 2.2’s additional criteria need a human tester, not a scanner, so a 2.2 audit would not paint a meaningfully different picture at this stage.

What “inclusion” is supposed to mean

Over 2 million people in the UK live with sight loss, and more than 18 million are deaf, have hearing loss, or live with tinnitus (Source: RNIB; RNID). More than 450,000 people are deafblind, living with both at once. This number is expected to pass 610,000 by 2035 (Source: Sense). Add in the autistic community whose barriers online are often sensory and cognitive (rather than sensory alone), officially estimated at circa 700,000 but likely far higher once undiagnosed adults are counted (Source: National Autistic Society; UCL). The audience shut out by a poorly built website is not niche. It’s a substantial part of the public any charity, healthcare provider or public body claims to serve.

Yet “inclusive” has become one of those buzzwords that organisations bandy about freely without actually checking whether it’s true. An organisation’s mission statement can enthusiastically promise accessibility, whilst its website can still fail every basic test for it. Nobody notices because nobody’s asked to prove it, and the people who could tell them there’s a problem have already left the site.

Government requirements

The legal position on accessibility is clear. WCAG 2.2 Level AA is the current published version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and is the technical standard now used by the UK public sector accessibility regulations. WCAG covers the practical things which decide whether a disabled person can actually use a site, such as whether it works with a screen reader, whether it can be navigated without a mouse, whether the colour contrast is high enough to read, and whether any video content is captioned.

For public sector organisations within the scope of the regulations, this isn’t simply a suggestion; it’s a legal requirement. The Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) Accessibility Regulations, 2018 require in-scope public sector websites and mobile applications to meet the applicable accessibility requirements. The current UK guidance states that this means conforming to the latest published version of WCAG. They also require a compliant accessibility statement. The statement must explain, among other things, where the website or app is inaccessible, why it is inaccessible, and how users can report accessibility issues.

This does not mean that every organisation receiving public money automatically falls within the regulations. A charity receiving government funding is not, simply because it receives that funding, a public sector body for the purposes of the regulations.

The gap between two laws

Two laws matter here, and neither one applies to every charity in exactly the same way.

The first is the Public Sector Bodies Regulations. It’s strict, but it only bites once an organisation is deemed a public body in the eyes of the law. That comes down to who funds it and who controls it. A body qualifies if it exists to meet a public need, isn’t run for profit, and is either mainly funded by the state, run under state supervision, or has a board where most members are appointed by the state. A charity living on public donations and legacies, run by its own independent trustees, wouldn’t normally tick any of those boxes.

But there’s a catch, and it matters for the charities in this study. The Regulations say non-governmental organisations sit outside their scope, unless those organisations provide services essential to the public, or are built specifically for disabled people. So a charity can’t assume that being independent automatically puts it in the clear, not if its whole purpose is serving disabled people. Whether a particular charity is caught depends on both its legal status and what it actually does.

Which means we can’t say most charities in this study sit outside the Public Sector Bodies Regulations. Some will. Some won’t. A charity set up specifically to serve disabled people may fall inside the Regulations precisely because of that.

None of this leaves a charity free of accessibility law altogether, though. Where the Public Sector Bodies Regulations don’t reach, something else does.

That something is the Equality Act 2010. It applies across England, Scotland and Wales to any organisation providing a service to the public, charities included, paid for or not. It requires reasonable steps where a disabled person would otherwise be left at a real disadvantage. And the organisation’s approach must be proactive, not reactive.  Organisations are expected to think about disabled users in advance, not wait for an individual to ask for an adjustment.

Here’s where it gets harder. The Equality Act never mentions WCAG. Nor does it provide a clear, technical checklist. What counts as “reasonable” is open to interpretation and depends on the situation: the type of service, whether an adjustment would actually work, what it would cost, and what resources the organisation has.

And therein lies the problem. A charity can’t assume independence keeps it outside the Public Sector Bodies Regulations, especially if it exists to serve disabled people. And where those Regulations don’t apply, the Equality Act almost certainly still does, for any charity providing a public service. But the Equality Act won’t give it a clean pass or fail. There’s no golden score to hit. Just a judgement call, and a duty to make that call properly.

Northern Ireland runs on separate equality law, so everything above about the Equality Act applies to England, Scotland and Wales only.

The uncomfortable truth

Every organisation in our study exists to serve people with disabilities. It is not unreasonable to assume that if fully accessible websites were to be found anywhere in the charity sector, they would be here. Yet most of the 60 organisations we tested have not achieved this.

The cost of this has real-world consequences: a missed appointment because a booking sequence couldn’t be navigated, a donation abandoned halfway through because a screen reader hit an unnamed button, a support service virtually inaccessible for the one person trying hardest to reach it.

Why does this keep happening?

Let me be absolutely clear, I genuinely don’t believe this is about people not caring. Passion and commitment to a cause are not in question. This is about process. It’s about how digital projects get built and signed off.

We all know budgets are tight in the third sector. Accessibility testing can be one of the first things trimmed back when a website project runs over. Agencies without genuine accessibility expertise treat it as a checklist item near the end of the build. In reality, it should be one of the foundation stones of the design, built in from the very start. Boards and trustees, often without any digital background themselves, rarely think to question whether the new website has been tested against WCAG 2.2 AA before signing off the invoice. Procurement processes often don’t require proof of conformance at all. Nobody in this chain is being deliberately negligent or knowingly excluding anyone. The process simply isn’t built to catch it.

What does doing it well look like?

Thirteen of the 60 websites in our study passed our automated testing with the structural basics in place.

What this group of organisations had in common is, in itself, a useful guide. None of them relied on any widget. All of them had a correct, simple page structure: a skip link, a main landmark, a properly ordered heading hierarchy, all built into a theme that then protected every page that followed. Their brand palettes had been tested for contrast rather than assuming they would be fine. Sites with a named owner, a published statement citing WCAG, and a review process scored consistently higher. That last bit is just as important as the rest, because accessibility erodes without maintenance.

None of this needs to be pricey if it’s built into the site from the start, rather than being retrofitted after launch. But it needs someone to take ownership and ask the right questions at the outset. It also needs to be tested by actual disabled users rather than automated software programmes. The latter cannot assess every aspect of accessibility, and a page can pass automated checks while still being difficult or impossible for a particular user to navigate.

Think of it as strategy, not compliance

Organisations that get this right clearly see this as a tool to expand reach, not as a legislative chore. A genuinely accessible website serves everyone: an older donor with failing eyesight and reduced fine motor control which comes with age, someone with a temporary injury, someone reading in a second language, someone scrolling one-thumbed whilst the other arm is occupied. As well as the deaf, blind, deafblind and autistic users the site was built to include by design. Accessibility done properly widens the audience able to donate, book a service, and find support.

Let’s also address the elephant in the room. It also protects reputation and credibility. In this sector, trust is the entire currency. If an organisation is in breach of its own accessibility statement, or, worse still, locks a door to the very community it claims to serve, it will have to rebuild something far harder than just its website.

Getting this right is one of the clearest ways a third sector organisation can prove its mission is more than just words on its homepage.

Where to begin

Run your own site through a WCAG 2.2 AA audit, and be really honest about what it finds. Don’t just rely on an automated scan alone. Real-world testing is key. Actually test it with a screen reader, with a user who relies on captions, and with an autistic user to see if your navigation passes muster. You might be surprised by the gap between how you assumed your site functioned and the reality.

What this comes down to

The communities failed by inaccessible websites are not abstract. They are current service users, current donors, and the very people some of these organisations were founded to serve. As we take a moment to think about what inclusion really means, fixing these issues is not a project for the future. It’s something we need to get right now. It’s the difference between a mission statement and a mission kept.

Without accessibility, inclusion is just a word.

Sources: TASK Agency Limited, “The State of Charity Website Accessibility” (August 2026),

Each homepage was loaded in a real browser and tested with industry-standard automated

WCAG 2.1 AA tooling.

Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) Accessibility Regulations 2018; Equality Act 2010; WCAG 2.2, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C); GOV.UK and DWP guidance on accessibility requirements for public sector bodies; Equality and Human Rights Commission, Code of Practice for services, public functions and associations, which became statutory on 5 August 2026. The European Accessibility Act is not included as a UK legal requirement because it is EU legislation and does not form part of the UK accessibility framework described here.