One report, many readers

Every charity report is read in more than one way. Some readers take it in on the page: the cover, the photographs, the charts. Others hear it read aloud, follow it in braille, or move through it using a keyboard.

For a sighted reader, a report with designed elements is almost always an improvement upon a plain Word document. For someone using a screen reader – software that reads a document aloud or converts it to braille – a designed report can often be worse than the plain version, and occasionally a barrier to access. The design itself isn’t the problem. What sits underneath it is.

What we looked at

Between July and September 2026 we reviewed 738 charity annual reports filed with the Charity Commission for England and Wales, covering five cause areas and every charity size with an income over £25,000.

We scored each against four visible signals of design effort. 198 were considered designed. Those 198 were then grouped into four levels of design effort and checked against seven standards – two visual and five structural – that decide whether a PDF works for someone using assistive technology: colour contrast, data visualisation, tagging, reading order, heading structure, alt text and document language.

Of the 198 charities that produced a designed annual report, 56 had also published a separate impact report. We could assess 36 of those.

We also ran a questionnaire with the people who design and commission these reports – communications leads, fundraisers, directors and trustees – and had 36 responses.

What we found at a glance

The report covers more ground than fits in a newsletter. A few of the findings:

• Only 27 percent of the 738 charities had applied any design decisions to their annual report at all.
• Across the four levels of design effort the pass rate barely moved. But at the most designed level, three checks dropped sharply: colour contrast, tagging and reading order.
• Alt text is one of the best known of the seven concepts, and the worst performing. It passed in 6 of the 171 reports containing images.
• Visual checks are easy to pass. Structural ones are not: 71 percent against 20.
• Three of the 198 designed annual reports passed all seven checks. Of the 36 impact reports, one did.

The report and the checklist

We’ve published the full research today as Accessible on Paper, with a companion checklist you can run on any PDF before sign-off. Both are free.