UK guidance
UK website accessibility law, explained plainly
Most UK organisations are covered by accessibility duties, and a lot of them don't realise it. Two separate pieces of law apply, they work differently, and only one of them mentions websites explicitly.
This page sets out who is in scope, what the standard actually is, what happens when someone complains, and what a reasonable first year of work looks like. No scare tactics and no invented fines.
Who is covered
Two regimes, not one
People tend to talk about "the accessibility regulations" as though there is a single rulebook. There are two, they cover different organisations, and they impose quite different obligations.
Equality Act 2010
Applies to almost every organisation serving the public
- Who
- Any service provider: private companies, charities, public bodies. Part 3 of the Act covers services and public functions.
- The duty
- Make reasonable adjustments so disabled people are not put at a substantial disadvantage. The duty is anticipatory, meaning you are expected to have thought about it before a disabled person turns up, not after.
- Websites
- Not named in the Act itself, but the Equality and Human Rights Commission's statutory Code of Practice treats website services as services, which is why it is generally accepted to apply.
- Standard
- None specified. "Reasonable" is judged case by case, which cuts both ways: no checklist to hide behind, but also no fixed bar to clear.
Accessibility Regulations 2018
Public sector bodies only, but far more specific
- Who
- Public sector bodies: central and local government, the NHS, most schools, colleges and universities, and many arm's length bodies. Some exemptions apply.
- The duty
- Meet a defined technical standard and publish an accessibility statement saying honestly how far you meet it, including what you don't.
- Scope
- Wider than the public website. Intranets, extranets, mobile apps, online forms, portals and documents such as PDFs are all in scope.
- Standard
- WCAG 2.2 at level AA. A 2022 Cabinet Office addendum means the requirement tracks the current version of WCAG automatically, with a grace period after each new release.
If you are a private business, the second column still matters to you. Not because it binds you, but because it is the closest thing the UK has to an agreed definition of an accessible website. If a complaint under the Equality Act ever needs resolving, WCAG 2.2 AA is the yardstick everyone in the room will reach for. It is also increasingly written into public sector procurement, so if you sell to government, your customers' obligations become your requirements.
The standard
What WCAG 2.2 AA actually asks for
WCAG is organised around four principles. Almost every real-world failure we see falls into one of them, and most are unglamorous rather than technically difficult.
Perceivable
- Images have meaningful alternative text
- Text has sufficient contrast against its background
- Video has captions, audio has transcripts
- Information is not conveyed by colour alone
Operable
- Everything works with a keyboard, with no traps
- The focus indicator is always visible
- Users can skip repeated navigation
- Nothing critical depends on a hover or a drag
Understandable
- The page declares its language
- Navigation is consistent between pages
- Form fields have real labels, not just placeholders
- Errors are explained in words, not just colour
Robust
- Valid, semantic HTML rather than nested generic elements
- Custom components expose a name, role and value
- Status messages are announced to assistive technology
- It works with screen readers, not just in a browser
Roughly a third of it can be tested automatically. Contrast, missing alt attributes and some markup errors are machine-checkable, and a free scanner will find them in seconds. The rest, whether alt text is actually meaningful, whether the keyboard order makes sense, whether an error message helps, needs a person. Any tool promising full automated compliance is describing something that does not exist.
Enforcement
What actually happens if you don't comply
This is where a lot of vendor marketing becomes unreliable, so here is the honest version.
There is no accessibility regulator issuing automatic fines to UK businesses, and no fixed penalty for failing WCAG. Anyone quoting you a specific fine figure is either describing a different country's law or making it up.
What exists instead is enforcement by the Equality and Human Rights Commission in England, Scotland and Wales, and the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland. They can investigate, issue unlawful act notices and take organisations to court. Separately, and in practice more commonly, a disabled person who cannot use your website can bring a claim directly.
To date no UK organisation has been successfully prosecuted specifically over website accessibility. Several cases have been settled out of court, which means the realistic exposure is a settlement, legal costs and the reputational cost of being the example, rather than a regulator's fine.
For public sector bodies the picture is firmer. Compliance is monitored centrally, accessibility statements are checked, and failures can be published. For most public bodies the pressure is reputational and procedural well before it is ever legal.
The better argument isn't the legal one. Around one in five people in the UK reports a disability, and that is before counting temporary impairments, ageing eyesight, and anyone reading a screen in bright sunlight. An inaccessible checkout loses those sales quietly, without a complaint, and without you ever finding out why. The legal duty is real, but the commercial case is usually larger and easier to act on.
Practical
A sensible first year
You do not need to fix everything at once, and trying to is how accessibility projects stall. This order gets the largest improvement for the least effort.
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Run an automated scan and fix what it finds
Free tools will surface contrast failures, missing alt text and unlabelled form fields within minutes. This is the cheapest work you will ever do and it clears a meaningful share of the issues.
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Try your own site with the keyboard alone
Unplug the mouse. Tab through your main journey, from landing page to checkout or enquiry form. If you cannot complete it, or you lose track of where the focus is, neither can a substantial group of your users.
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Publish an accessibility statement
Mandatory for public sector bodies, and worth doing anyway. Say what you have done, what you know is still wrong, and how someone reports a problem. An honest statement is far better received than a perfect-sounding one.
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Get a manual audit of your key journeys
Not the whole site. The three or four paths that matter commercially. A tester using a screen reader will find things no scanner can, and the findings usually generalise across templates.
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Make it part of how you build
Add the basic checks to your definition of done and to your supplier requirements. Accessibility is much cheaper designed in than retrofitted, and retrofitting is what makes it feel expensive.
Where a toolbar fits
Being straight about what our own product does
We make an accessibility toolbar called Adjustable, so we have an obvious interest here. It is worth being clear about the limits.
A toolbar gives your visitors control over how your site presents itself: text size and spacing, colour and contrast, narration, reading aids, translation. For a lot of people that is the difference between using your site comfortably and giving up on it. It also works immediately, across every page, without a development cycle.
What it does not do is make you WCAG conformant. Conformance is a property of your underlying site, its markup, its structure, its keyboard support, and no overlay changes that. Vendors who imply otherwise have caused real harm to this industry, and several have been sued over exactly that claim.
The sensible position is that a toolbar sits alongside the work in the previous section rather than replacing any of it. If someone is selling you a one-line fix for a legal obligation, that is the moment to be sceptical.