Website accessibility: what UK businesses must know

Millions of people in the UK live with a disability. Many more have a temporary or situational one: a broken wrist, a migraine, sunlight on a phone screen, a noisy train. Website accessibility means building sites that work for all of them, and it is far less complicated than most owners assume.

It is also worth doing for reasons beyond the right thing. Accessible sites are easier for search engines and AI assistants to read, and they tend to be clearer and better structured. Under the Equality Act 2010, UK service providers also have a duty to make reasonable adjustments, and that includes digital services.

What the law actually says

The Equality Act 2010 requires providers of goods and services to make reasonable adjustments so disabled people are not put at a substantial disadvantage. It does not name a technical standard for private company websites. What it does mean is that an inaccessible website can amount to discrimination, and businesses have faced claims on that basis.

Public sector bodies have a stricter, explicit obligation under separate accessibility regulations, including meeting the WCAG standard and publishing an accessibility statement. If you sell to the public sector, expect that to be passed down to you in procurement.

For everyone else, the practical approach is to work to WCAG 2.2 level AA. It is the internationally recognised standard, it is what any assessment would be measured against, and it is achievable on a normal budget. Nothing here is legal advice, and you should take proper advice on a specific concern, but AA is the target the industry works to for good reason.

The fixes that cover most of the ground

Colour contrast

Light grey text on a white background is the most common failure on the web, and designers keep doing it because it looks elegant. Body text needs a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 against its background, and large text needs 3 to 1. Free checkers tell you in seconds. Check text over images and hover states too, which are frequently forgotten.

Do not use colour alone to carry meaning either. If a form field turns red when there is an error, someone who cannot distinguish that red will not know. Add a message in words. The same goes for charts, availability indicators and required fields.

Alt text on images

Every image carrying information needs a short description of what it shows. Purely decorative images should have an empty alt attribute so screen readers skip them rather than announcing a filename. Do not start with "image of", and do not stuff keywords in.

Real headings, in order

Screen reader users navigate by jumping between headings, so a page needs one main heading and a logical structure beneath it. Do not pick a heading level for how big it looks. Style it how you want and mark it up as what it is.

Keyboard access

Unplug your mouse and try to use your site with the tab key. You should reach every link, button and field, in a sensible order, and always see where you are. If the focus outline was removed for looking untidy, put it back or design a better one. Watch for menus that only open on hover, and modal windows that trap you inside.

Forms that make sense

Every field needs a visible label attached in the code. Placeholder text is not a label, because it disappears the moment someone types. Errors should say what went wrong and how to fix it, beside the field.

Media and motion

Captions on video, a transcript for audio. Captions also help the many people who watch with the sound off, so this one pays for itself. Anything moving for more than five seconds needs a pause control, and avoid content that flashes. Respect the operating system setting for reduced motion, one line of code that stops your animations making someone feel unwell.

How to check your own site in an afternoon

You can get a long way without specialist knowledge:

1. Run an automated checker on your main pages. Free browser extensions flag contrast, missing alt text, unlabelled fields and heading order problems.
2. Do the keyboard test on the homepage, a service page, the contact form and the checkout.
3. Zoom the browser to 200% and look for text that overlaps or disappears.
4. Turn on your phone's screen reader for five minutes and try to reach your contact details.

Automated tools only catch a portion of the issues, so do not stop at a green score. The keyboard and zoom tests will find things no scanner reports.

Fixing it without a full rebuild

Most accessibility problems on an existing site are content and CSS issues rather than architectural ones. Contrast, alt text, labels, headings and focus states can usually be fixed on the site you already have, for a fraction of the cost of a rebuild.

A word of caution about overlay widgets, the toolbars promising instant compliance from a line of JavaScript. They do not fix underlying code, disability groups have consistently criticised them, and their presence has not prevented complaints. Spend the money on the actual fixes.

If you are commissioning a new site, put accessibility in the brief. Built in from the start it costs very little. Retrofitted later it costs a great deal, which is why we treat it as part of how a site is designed rather than an optional extra.

The side benefits nobody mentions

Accessible markup is machine-readable markup. Proper headings, descriptive links, real text instead of words baked into images, alt attributes and clean structure are exactly what search engines use to understand a page, and what AI assistants rely on when deciding whether to quote you.

Accessible sites also convert better for everyone. Bigger tap targets, clearer forms, better contrast and plainer language help the tired, the distracted and the person on a cracked phone screen in the rain. That is most of your customers, some of the time.

Common questions

Can my small business be sued over an inaccessible website?

Claims under the Equality Act have been brought over digital services in the UK. The realistic risk for a small business is lower than the noise suggests, but it is not zero, and the reputational side matters too. Making reasonable improvements is the sensible position.

What is WCAG, in plain terms?

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, an international standard with three levels: A, AA and AAA. AA is the practical target for almost everyone. It is a set of testable criteria covering things like contrast, keyboard use and clear labelling.

Do I need an accessibility statement?

It is mandatory for public sector sites and optional elsewhere, but still worth having. A short page explaining what you have done, what you know is imperfect, and how to reach you shows good faith and gives people a route to report problems.

Not sure where you stand?

We can give you a plain list of what fails, what it affects and what it takes to fix, in priority order rather than a 200 page report. Get in touch, or read about the care plans that keep this sort of thing from drifting.