Insights

5 Ways to Make Your Nonprofit’s Website Easier to Read

Some good news first. According to the 2026 WebAIM Million analysis, nonprofit and charity home pages average 43 detected accessibility errors, which is 23.3% better than the all-sites average of 56.1. Nonprofit web teams are doing better work than the internet at large.

But the same report flags a harder trend. Home pages are growing more complex fast. The average home page now contains 1,437 elements, up 22.5% in a single year. More elements means more places for friction to creep in, even on sites that pass automated audits. And a separate user-experience study by Nexer Digital, which interviewed visitors with disabilities about their browsing journeys, found that most visual barriers are reported during ordinary browsing, long before checkout or sign-up. Participants described feeling tired, frustrated, or unsure whether a site was worth the effort.

That second part is the gap. A site can be technically compliant and still leave the visitor exhausted. Here are five practical improvements that address it.

1. Let visitors increase text size

Browser zoom works, but most visitors don’t know it exists, don’t remember the keyboard shortcut, or find it awkward once page layouts start to break at larger zooms. Offering a way to increase font size directly on the page removes that friction.

This matters most on the pages where nonprofits ask visitors to read carefully: program details, impact reports, grant applications, volunteer info, and donation pages.

2. Improve line spacing and letter spacing

Dense paragraphs are tiring. The British Dyslexia Association’s 2023 style guide recommends 1.5 line spacing, larger inter-letter spacing (around 35% of the average letter width), and inter-word spacing of at least 3.5 times the inter-letter spacing. The same adjustments tend to help non-dyslexic readers, especially anyone reading for more than a minute.

A surprising amount of reading difficulty is really visual fatigue, and these are some of the highest-leverage fixes for it.

3. Offer higher-contrast viewing options

Visitors don’t all experience a website the same way. Some benefit from darker backgrounds at night, some from stronger black-on-white contrast in bright sunlight, some from warmer or lower-contrast palettes if they’re sensitive to glare. Giving visitors a choice between two or three viewing modes is a far smaller lift than redesigning the whole site, and it covers most of the comfort range.

4. Reduce visual distractions

Autoplay videos in hero sections, animated stat counters, carousel banners, and parallax scrolling all compete with the content underneath. For some visitors that competition tips into overwhelm. Pausing animations, isolating a single paragraph at a time, or hiding non-essential page elements gives readers a quieter surface to focus on.

Nexer Digital’s Hidden Journey research backs this up. The moments where visitors disengage are not the moments where they hit a hard accessibility failure. They are the moments where visual complexity quietly drains attention.

5. Give visitors direct control

The four improvements above can be built into a site’s design. But site-level decisions only go so far, because different visitors need different things. One donor wants 20% larger text. Another needs higher contrast. A third just wants the carousel to stop moving.

This is where visitor-controlled reading tools come in. They include browser-native zoom, operating-system accessibility settings, reader-mode browser extensions, and on-page reading menus added by the site itself. Each works in a different layer, and the strongest experience usually combines several of them. Nonprofits whose audience skews older, lower-vision, or less technical benefit the most from making at least one of these options visible and easy to find directly on the page.

The honest takeaway

Accessible design and reading comfort are not in competition. A nonprofit site can follow WCAG and still leave room for visitors who do not use specialized software but still want a more comfortable read.

For nonprofits the audience case is concrete. Older donors, tired visitors at the end of a long day, mobile readers in line at a coffee shop, board members reviewing a report on a tablet. Small readability improvements decide how many of them stay on the page long enough to give, volunteer, or come back.