Every Sunday, churches go out of their way to make room for people. There's a ramp by the side door, large-print bulletins at the welcome table, a hearing loop or a few reserved seats near the front. Nobody thinks of that as extra. It's just part of being a welcoming church.
Your website is the first door a lot of people walk through, and it deserves the same kind of care. The good news is that most of what makes a church website easier for everyone to use isn't technical or expensive. It's attention to a handful of details that often get missed.
Why it matters more than it seems
According to the CDC, more than 1 in 4 adults in the United States have some type of disability, including disabilities that affect vision, hearing, mobility, and cognition. Add in the many members whose eyes simply aren't what they used to be, and a parent trying to read your service times on a cracked phone in bright sunlight, and you're talking about a large share of the people who visit your site.
Meanwhile, the web as a whole isn't doing well here. WebAIM, a nonprofit at Utah State University, tests the home pages of the top one million websites every year. In its 2026 report, 95.9% of those home pages had detectable accessibility failures. The most common problems were low-contrast text (83.9% of pages), images with no text description (53.1%), form fields with no label (51%), and links with no readable text (46.3%).
Those four problems are exactly the kind a church can find and fix without a developer. Here's how to check your own site.
1. Check that your text is easy to read
Light gray text on a white background, or white text over a busy photo, looks stylish on a designer's large monitor and nearly disappears on a phone outdoors. The international guidelines for web accessibility (WCAG, published by the W3C) set a minimum contrast between text and its background so it stays readable for people with low vision.
Try this: Open your site on your phone, step outside, and turn the screen brightness down. Can you still read your service times, your address, and the buttons? If you have to squint, so does everyone else. A free tool like WebAIM's Contrast Checker will tell you exactly whether two colors pass.
2. Describe your images
A screen reader is software that reads a page out loud for people who are blind or have low vision. When it reaches a photo, it reads the image's "alt text," a short written description stored with the image. If there isn't one, the listener hears nothing useful, or sometimes just a file name like "IMG_4471.jpg."
Try this: In your website editor, open a few of your main images and look for a field called "alt text" or "alternative text." Write a plain, short description of what matters in the photo: "Children singing at the front of the sanctuary during Vacation Bible School." If an image is pure decoration, most editors let you mark it that way so it's skipped.
One more thing: if your service times, an event date, or a sermon title only appears inside a graphic, a screen reader can't read it, and neither can Google. Put that information in real text on the page as well.
3. Label every form field
Prayer request forms, contact forms, and event sign-ups are some of the most important parts of a church site. A common shortcut is to put gray hint text inside each box ("Your name," "Email") instead of a real label above it. That hint text disappears as soon as someone starts typing, and screen readers may not announce it at all.
Try this: Look at each form on your site. Every box should have a visible label that stays put. Required fields should say they're required in words, not only with a red color or an asterisk.
4. Make links say where they go
"Click here" and "Learn more" repeated five times on one page don't tell anyone much, and they're especially confusing for someone using a screen reader, which can list all the links on a page by themselves. An icon with no text, like a Facebook logo, can end up announced as nothing at all.
Try this: Read just the link text on your home page out loud, with nothing around it. "Plan your visit," "Watch Sunday's sermon," and "Give online" make sense on their own. "Click here" doesn't.
5. Put the mouse away
Some people can't use a mouse and get around a page with the Tab key instead. Others use voice control or a switch device that works much the same way.
Try this: On a computer, click into your browser's address bar, then press Tab over and over. You should be able to see a highlight move through the menu, links, and buttons in a sensible order, and you should be able to open the menu and submit a form without touching the mouse. If the highlight vanishes or gets stuck, make a note of where.
6. Give video and audio a text option
If you post sermons or announcements as video, captions help people who are deaf or hard of hearing, and they also help the person watching in a waiting room with the sound off. Many video platforms can create automatic captions. They aren't perfect, so it's worth a quick read-through to correct names and Scripture references.
A good place to start
You don't have to do all of this in one week. Pick the three pages a first-time guest is most likely to visit (usually your home page, your service times or plan-a-visit page, and your contact page) and run these checks there first. Write down what you find, fix what's easy, and keep a short list of what needs help.
It's the same instinct behind the ramp by the side door: making sure nobody has to struggle just to get in.
Journey Digital is a small, owner-run church web studio in Wilson, NC. If you'd like a second set of eyes on how easy your church's website is to use, we'd be glad to talk.
Sources
- CDC, "Disability Impacts All of Us"
- WebAIM, "The WebAIM Million: The 2026 report on the accessibility of the top 1,000,000 home pages"
- W3C Web Accessibility Initiative, "WCAG 2 Overview"
- WebAIM Contrast Checker