Your Website Is Legally Required to Be Accessible

We have spent the last week writing about regulations. Making Tax Digital. Employment law changes. The late payment crackdown. Three new things small businesses need to deal with this April.

This one is not new. It has been the law since 2010. But almost every small business owner I talk to has never heard of it.

Your website is legally required to be accessible to people with disabilities.

What "accessible" actually means#

Accessible does not mean a special version of the site for disabled people. It means your normal website works for everyone, including people who cannot see the screen, cannot use a mouse, cannot hear audio, or process information differently.

About 16 million people in the UK have a disability. That is roughly one in four of the adult population. Many more have temporary difficulties: a broken wrist, an eye infection, reading on a phone in bright sunlight. When your website is inaccessible, you are shutting out a significant chunk of your potential customers without even knowing it.

In practice, accessibility means following a set of standards called WCAG 2.2 Level AA. That stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and it is the benchmark UK courts and regulators use to decide whether a website meets its legal obligations. You do not need to memorise the standard. What matters is what it means for your site in plain English.

Where the law comes from#

The Equality Act 2010 requires businesses to make "reasonable adjustments" so that disabled people can access their services. Websites count as a service. If your website is inaccessible and someone with a disability cannot use it, that is potentially unlawful discrimination.

There has not been a wave of lawsuits against small businesses in the UK over this, and enforcement is still mainly complaints-driven. But globally, over 5,000 digital accessibility lawsuits were filed in 2025, a 20% increase on the year before, and the direction of travel is clear. In the EU, the European Accessibility Act came into force in June 2025, setting explicit accessibility requirements for all digital services. If you have any customers in the EU, those rules apply to you directly.

The EU rules do exempt micro-enterprises with fewer than 10 employees and under two million euros in turnover, but that only covers the European Accessibility Act. The UK Equality Act has no such exemption. If you provide a service to the public through your website, the law applies regardless of your size.

What actually trips up most small business websites#

You do not need to be an accessibility expert to spot the common problems. Most of them are the same ones showing up on thousands of small business sites, and most are straightforward to fix.

Images with no alt text. When you add an image to your website and do not write a description of what it shows, screen readers (the software blind and partially sighted people use to browse the web) either skip it entirely or just announce "image" with no context. If that image is your hero banner explaining what your business does, a blind visitor has missed your entire pitch. Every meaningful image needs a short text description. Decorative images, things like backgrounds and dividers, should be marked so screen readers ignore them.

Poor colour contrast. Light grey text on a white background looks clean in a design mockup. It is unreadable for anyone with low vision, colour blindness, or a screen in direct sunlight. WCAG requires a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 for normal text and 3 to 1 for large text. There are free tools that check this in seconds.

Forms without proper labels. If your contact form has input boxes but no visible labels, or labels that are not connected to the fields in the code, a screen reader user cannot tell what to type where. "Enter your name" needs to be coded as a label attached to the field, not just placed next to the box visually.

No keyboard navigation. Not everyone uses a mouse. Some people navigate entirely with the Tab key, Enter key, and arrow keys. If your site has interactive elements like menus, forms, and buttons that only work with a mouse click or a hover, those users are stuck. Try tabbing through your own website right now. If you cannot reach every link and button, or if you cannot see which element is currently focused, that is a problem.

Videos without captions. If you have video on your site with no captions or transcripts, deaf and hard-of-hearing visitors cannot access the content. Auto-generated captions are better than nothing, but they need reviewing. They get names, industry terms, and numbers wrong constantly.

Tiny tap targets. Buttons and links that are too small or packed too close together are difficult for anyone with motor difficulties, and honestly difficult for most of us on a phone. WCAG 2.2 requires a minimum target size of 24 by 24 pixels, with a recommended size of 44 by 44.

How to check your site in five minutes#

You do not need to hire an auditor to find the obvious problems. Here are four things you can do right now.

Tab through your site. Open your homepage in a browser, click somewhere on the page, and start pressing Tab. Can you reach every link and button? Can you see where the focus is on each press, a visible outline or highlight around the currently selected element? If the focus disappears into invisible elements or you get trapped somewhere, that is a failure.

Run a free audit. Google Chrome has a built-in accessibility audit tool called Lighthouse. Right-click on your page, select "Inspect," go to the Lighthouse tab, and run an accessibility audit. It will flag missing alt text, contrast issues, missing form labels, and dozens of other problems. It gives you a score out of 100. Under 80 means there is real work to do.

Check your contrast. Search for "WebAIM contrast checker" and enter your text colour and background colour. It tells you instantly whether you pass WCAG requirements. Do this for your body text, your headings, and your button text. You might be surprised how many fail.

Turn off images. In Chrome settings, you can disable images entirely. Browse your site with images off. Can you still understand what the business does and how to get in touch? If critical information only exists inside images, you have an accessibility gap, and probably an SEO gap too.

The business case beyond the law#

Compliance matters, but the practical benefits go further than avoiding a complaint.

The spending power of disabled people in the UK is estimated at 274 billion pounds a year. It is sometimes called the "purple pound." An inaccessible website is not just a legal risk. It is a barrier between you and a lot of potential customers who are ready to spend.

Accessible websites also tend to be better websites for everyone. Proper heading structure, clear labels, strong contrast, logical navigation. These are the same things that make a site easy to use for all visitors and easier for search engines to understand. Google cannot see your images either. It reads alt text the same way a screen reader does. Good accessibility and good SEO share most of the same foundations. We wrote about the tech behind your website a few weeks ago. The same principles that make a site fast and well-structured are the ones that make it accessible.

Sites that are easier to use convert better. Clear buttons, readable text, logical forms, simple navigation. These are conversion fundamentals, and they are also accessibility fundamentals. You are not building two separate things. You are building one thing well.

What to do about it#

If you built your site yourself or you are on a template platform, run the checks above. Fix the easy things first: add alt text to your images, increase text contrast where it fails, make sure forms have proper labels, and test keyboard navigation. Those four changes alone will cover the most common problems.

If you have a web designer or developer, ask them directly: "Is our site WCAG 2.2 Level AA compliant?" If they do not know what that means, that tells you something useful about the service you are paying for.

If you work with us, accessibility is baked into how we build. Semantic HTML, proper heading structures, ARIA labels where needed, contrast-checked design, keyboard-navigable interfaces. It is not an add-on or a premium feature. It is how websites should be built.

The law has required this since 2010. The standards are clear, the checking tools are free, and the fixes for most small business websites are not complicated. The only barrier was knowing about it in the first place.

Now you do.