Making a church website usable for everyone
Church website accessibility means people with impaired sight, hearing or movement can use the site. Five fixes cover most of it: readable contrast, real text instead of text in images, descriptive image alternatives, keyboard navigation, and captions on video.
Why does this matter for a church?
Because congregations skew older than the general population, and impaired sight becomes common with age. A church website with pale grey text on white excludes a meaningful share of its own members.
The same fixes help everyone. Adequate contrast is easier for all readers, and captions on video help anyone watching without sound.
What is the most common problem?
Text inside images. Service times presented as a graphic cannot be read by a screen reader, cannot be enlarged without blurring, and cannot be read by search engines either.
This single issue is both the most common accessibility failure on church websites and one of the most common reasons service times do not appear in search results.
What about contrast?
Normal-size text needs a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 against its background. Light grey on white commonly falls near 2 to 1, which is uncomfortable for most readers and unusable for some.
Free browser tools measure this in seconds. It is usually the fastest meaningful improvement available.
What do images need?
A short description of what the image shows, for people using screen readers. "Congregation singing during Sunday morning service" is useful; "IMG_4821" is not.
Purely decorative images should be marked as such so they are skipped rather than announced.
Are we legally required to do this?
It depends on your country and on whether the church counts as a public body or service provider. Requirements differ enough that a general answer would be misleading.
The practical case does not depend on the legal one. These fixes are inexpensive and they serve members the congregation already has.
What does fixing accessibility cost?
Contrast and alternative text are small changes, usually under a day of work on a site of 5 to 10 pages. Both are also the two fixes that help the most readers.
Replacing text that currently sits inside images depends on how much of the site relies on it. Where service times are a graphic, that is one image and 10 minutes; where an entire page is a designed poster, it is a page rebuild.
Captions on sermon video are worth budgeting separately. Automatic transcription is now accurate enough that correcting it takes roughly 10 to 15 minutes per 30-minute recording.
Work in this area
Frequently asked questions
Can we test accessibility ourselves?
Yes. Free tools such as WAVE and the Lighthouse audit built into Chrome find most issues in seconds and explain each one.
Does an accessibility overlay fix this?
Overlays are widely criticised by disabled users and frequently make navigation worse. Fixing the underlying markup is more reliable and usually cheaper.
Do we need captions on sermon videos?
They help significantly, and automatic captions have become accurate enough to be worth correcting rather than writing from scratch.
What about our PDF newsletters?
PDFs are often inaccessible and are also harder for search engines and AI tools to read. Publishing the same content as a web page solves both problems.
How much does this cost to fix?
Contrast and alternative text are usually small changes. Replacing text-in-images depends on how much of the site relies on it.
Talk it through first
A short call costs nothing and usually clarifies whether this is the right next step for your organisation.
Get in touch