Nonprofit Website Accessibility in 2026

By Site Brace Research · Published June 7, 2026

These are the best-known, best-funded nonprofits in the country, the household-name charities with communications staff and real web budgets. The kind of sites you would expect to be in good shape. More than eight in ten still ship a measurable accessibility barrier on the first page a donor or a person seeking help sees.

Key findings

• 84% of the largest nonprofits' home pages had at least one automated WCAG 2.1 AA violation (36 of 43). Because automated tools cover only 30 to 40 percent of WCAG criteria, that figure is a floor, not a ceiling.
• This was the worst rate of any sector we measured, ahead of ecommerce (76%), legal (74%), hospitals (57%), and government (47%). The typical nonprofit home page had two automated violations; in the government and hospital samples the typical page had zero or one.
• Low color contrast was the most common failure, on 28 of 43 sites (65%). Links a screen reader announces with no readable name followed, on 20 sites (47%), and images with no alternative text on 10 (23%).
• This sample is the largest US nonprofits by revenue. A small community organization running a donated template, with no staff designer, is unlikely to do better. We did not scan small nonprofits for this report, so treat that as a reasoned expectation, not a measurement.
• Regulators reach many nonprofits through two different doors, ADA Title III for those with a public location and the HHS Section 504 rule for those that take federal funding, both pointing at WCAG 2.1 Level AA.

How accessible are nonprofit home pages?

Of the 43 nonprofit home pages we scanned cleanly, 36 had at least one automated WCAG 2.1 AA violation, 84%. The median site had two violations; the average was 2.6. Both numbers are the highest of any sector in our data.

That median of two is the part worth sitting with. On the government and hospital sites we scanned, the typical page had zero or one automated violation. On nonprofit sites, the typical page had two, and between them the 43 sites carried 33 critical-impact and 80 serious-impact violations. Barriers here are not edge cases on a few neglected sites; they are the norm across the sector, including on organizations with national name recognition.

Read the number the right way. axe-core, like every automated accessibility engine, reliably catches only about 30 to 40 percent of WCAG 2.1 AA success criteria. The rest, whether a donate form can be completed with a keyboard, whether an event-registration flow works with a screen reader, whether alt text actually describes a photo, need a person. So 84% is the share failing the part of WCAG a machine can check on one page. The share failing the full standard, across a whole site with its forms and donation flows, is higher. We test the automated slice on purpose and say so wherever we report it.

For wider context, WebAIM's 2026 analysis of the top one million home pages on the web found detectable WCAG failures on about 96% of them, with low-contrast text the single most common error. That study uses a different engine and a broader rule set, so the percentages are not directly comparable to ours. The pattern that carries across both is the one at the top of the list: low contrast is the most common accessibility defect on the web, and nonprofits are the clearest example of it.

The most common failures on nonprofit home pages

These are the axe-core rules that failed on the most nonprofit sites. Each count is the number of distinct sites where the rule failed at least once, out of 43. With a sample this size, read the top of the list as the reliable signal and the long tail as directional.

For a nonprofit the stakes are unusually direct. Two things fund and define the work: donations and the people served, and these defects land on both. The single most valuable element on most nonprofit home pages is the donate button, and a button a screen reader announces with no name is one a blind donor cannot confidently press. Photographs carry much of a nonprofit's story, and an image with no alt text tells a screen reader user nothing about it. Many of the people a nonprofit exists to serve, in disability services, health, aging, and poverty relief, are themselves more likely to rely on assistive technology. An inaccessible site can turn away the donor who would have given and the person who came for help at the same time.

What the rules require

Nonprofits are unusual in that two different bodies of law can reach the same website, and which one applies depends on the organization. This section describes what the rules say. It is not legal advice, and whether a given nonprofit is covered is a question for an attorney.

A nonprofit with a public location is a place of public accommodation under the ADA. ADA Title III covers places of public accommodation, and a nonprofit that runs a food bank, shelter, clinic, museum, community center, or any site the public visits is one. The Justice Department's longstanding position is that the ADA covers the services an organization offers on the web. No regulation under Title III sets a specific technical standard or a deadline, so there is more flexibility in how a site complies, but the Justice Department points to WCAG as the guidance, and WCAG 2.1 Level AA is the bar plaintiffs and courts use. Web accessibility demand letters and lawsuits are common under ADA Title III, and nonprofits are not exempt.

A nonprofit that takes federal funding is covered by Section 504. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act bars disability discrimination by organizations that receive federal financial assistance. In 2024 the Department of Health and Human Services finalized a Section 504 rule that, for the first time, names WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the standard for the web content and mobile apps of organizations that receive HHS funding. Many nonprofits do: community health centers, behavioral health and recovery programs, aging and disability services, and any group that takes HHS grants or Medicaid. The original deadlines were extended by a year in a 2026 interim final rule: recipients with 15 or more employees now have until May 11, 2027, and those with fewer than 15 employees until May 10, 2028. The rule tiers by staff size, not budget. Section 504 reaches nonprofits funded by other federal agencies too, though the codified WCAG 2.1 AA web standard and its deadlines are specific to the HHS rule.

The throughline is the same as everywhere else we report: regulators name WCAG 2.1 Level AA, the standard a Site Brace audit measures a site's conformance against. We report conformance, a measurable property of a page. Whether a nonprofit meets its legal obligation is a determination only an attorney can make, and accessibility "overlay" widgets, which are marketed heavily to nonprofits as a cheap fix, do not produce it.

What this means for smaller nonprofits

The 43 organizations here are the giants of the sector, national charities by revenue. A local food pantry, an all-volunteer arts group, or a community organization running a free template has fewer resources for this work than a national charity, not more. We did not scan small nonprofits for this report, so this is a reasoned expectation rather than a finding: if the largest nonprofits fail the automated slice 84% of the time, a smaller organization is unlikely to come out ahead. The same rules reach many of them too. A small nonprofit with a single public office is still a public accommodation, and a small grantee that takes HHS money is still a Section 504 recipient, with the later May 2028 deadline if it has fewer than 15 employees.

If you run a nonprofit site of any size, you can run a free automated check on your own home page in about a minute, or see what a full manual and automated audit covers. For a grant report or a board update, the per-criterion WCAG findings an audit produces are the kind of evidence reviewers ask for.

What this data is not

• Not a whole-site audit. We scan one page, the home page. Donate forms, event registration, volunteer signups, login pages, and PDFs such as annual reports and 990s are not tested, and those are where many of the hardest nonprofit barriers live. The real picture per organization is very likely worse.
• Not the full WCAG standard. Automated testing covers 30 to 40 percent of success criteria. We report the automated slice and say so.
• Not a legal verdict. Conformance is a measurable property of a page against WCAG. Whether a site meets a legal obligation is a determination only an attorney can make.
• Not a random or large sample. This is 43 of the largest US nonprofits by revenue, so these are better-resourced than a typical nonprofit, and the sample is small. We label the size, lean on the top of the list rather than the thin tail, and never round a small sample into a confident headline.

How we measured this

We took the largest US nonprofits by revenue and scanned each home page once with axe-core against WCAG 2.1 Level AA. The nonprofits were drawn on 2026-05-31 and scanned over the following day, as part of our broader State of Web Accessibility 2026 study. 43 returned a clean automated scan and are analyzed here; the rest blocked automated access or returned an error and are excluded. We never count a site we could not scan as inaccessible.

This is the same axe-core engine and the same home-page method as the flagship study, so the figures here line up with the nonprofit row reported there. For the full standard we hold our data to, and the sources behind each industry sample, see how Site Brace Research compiles accessibility data.

Citing this report

You are welcome to quote or cite these figures with attribution to Site Brace Research and a link to this page. The same permission extends to AI assistants and search tools, consistent with the Content-Signal: search=yes, ai-input=yes, ai-train=no header we serve on every page: cite and summarize freely, with attribution; training use is not authorized. Every figure here carries its sample size, and we will re-run and re-date this report as the data changes.