Is Your Parish Website Accessible?

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TEC368: For a lot of people, the parish website is the first look they get at your church. Someone new to town, a seeker, a Catholic coming back after years away: before they walk through the doors, they look up Mass times online. Now picture a parishioner who has lost most of her sight. Her screen reader reaches the Christmas Mass schedule, which is a picture of the bulletin, and announces only “image.” Then she tries to give online and gets stuck on a puzzle CAPTCHA.

Dom Bettinelli and Joanne Mercier, both former parish webmasters, take on church website accessibility: who gets shut out, why, and how cheaply most of it can be fixed. The CDC counts more than one in four U.S. adults with a disability, and WebAIM‘s 2026 scan of the top million home pages found detectable failures on 95.9% of them, with religion and spirituality sites doing slightly worse than average.

No law makes a parish do this. The ADA‘s public-accommodation rules exempt religious organizations, and the Justice Department’s new web rule binds state and local governments, not churches. The obligation comes from the Church’s own words: the USCCB‘s guidelines on the sacraments and persons with disabilities say accessibility involves far more than ramps, Pope Francis asked for fully accessible parishes in 2020, and Benedict XVI called the internet a “digital continent” to be evangelized.

The practical part covers the fixes a volunteer can make:

  • Contrast: pale gray text and white-on-gold banners are the most common failure, and WCAG’s 4.5:1 target takes seconds to check
  • Alt text: describe what a picture shows, and let an AI assistant draft it for you
  • Real headings and descriptive links, which screen reader users navigate by, plus a keyboard-only test of your home page
  • Giving and registration forms: visible labels, plain instructions, CAPTCHA alternatives, and an Accessibility Conformance Report from your vendor
  • Captions on the pastor’s videos, because auto-captions stumble on “consubstantial” and visiting priests’ accents
  • The bulletin PDF problem: put Mass times, confession, office hours and how to register on the site as plain text

They also clear up two myths: an accessibility overlay widget doesn’t make a site compliant, and passing a free checker isn’t the same as being usable. Dom admits SQPN.com fails too, and says what he plans to do about it.

In the picks, Joanne recommends the Kasa outdoor smart plug for holiday lights, and Dom recommends Cotypist, on-device AI autocomplete for the Mac.

Share this one with your pastor, or with whoever runs your parish website.

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