If your website is not built to work for disabled visitors, you are turning away a large share of potential customers, and you may be on the wrong side of the law. Here is what website accessibility means in practice, what UK law actually requires, and what you can do about it.
What Is Website Accessibility?
Website accessibility means building and maintaining your site so that everyone can use it, regardless of any disability or impairment. That covers people who are blind or have low vision, people who are deaf or hard of hearing, people with motor difficulties who cannot use a mouse, and people with cognitive conditions such as dyslexia.
A visually impaired person might use a screen reader to listen to your website. Someone with limited hand movement might rely entirely on a keyboard to navigate. Someone who struggles with small text needs a site that lets them zoom in without the layout breaking. These are not edge cases. They are real customers trying to do business with you.
The international standard is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, WCAG. The current version, WCAG 2.2, sets out four principles: your website must be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. Level AA is the benchmark most UK businesses should aim for.
What Does UK Law Actually Require?
The Equality Act 2010 covers businesses of all sizes. It requires you to make reasonable adjustments so disabled people can access your goods and services on equal terms, and that duty extends to your website. If someone cannot use your site because it was not built with accessibility in mind, you could face a discrimination complaint.
Public sector organisations face stricter, specific rules: they must meet WCAG 2.2 AA under the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018. For private businesses, the Equality Act still applies, even though its wording is less prescriptive about the exact technical standard.
If you sell products or services to customers in the EU, the European Accessibility Act, enforceable since June 2025, is also relevant. It does not set one single fine amount, since each EU member state writes its own penalties into national law, but the range is real: Italy can fine up to 5% of annual turnover or €40,000 for smaller firms, France can fine €50,000 with an additional €25,000 for related offences, and Germany can fine up to €100,000 for non-compliant products. Which figure applies depends entirely on which countries you sell into.
Accessibility is not just the right thing to do. For most UK businesses trading with any scale, it is a legal obligation in more than one direction.
The Business Case You Cannot Ignore
Around 16 million people in the UK have a disability. The combined spending power of UK households with at least one disabled person, often called the purple pound, is estimated at £274 billion a year, with a significant share of that spent online.
Research known as the Click-Away Pound survey, looking at online behaviour among disabled UK shoppers, found that a large share give up on websites they find too difficult to use, and go elsewhere instead. Once a disabled customer finds a site that works well for them, they tend to stick with it rather than risk trying somewhere new. That loyalty cuts both ways: sites that work well keep customers, and sites that do not lose them permanently, not just for one visit.
There is a search visibility benefit too. Many accessibility improvements, descriptive image alt text, clear heading structures, well-organised page layouts, are the same things search engines reward. Getting your site right for disabled users often improves search performance at the same time.
The Most Common Accessibility Problems on UK Business Websites
According to the WebAIM Million 2026 report, which tested accessibility across one million home pages, 95.9% had detectable WCAG 2 failures, up from 94.8% the year before. Accessibility across the web is getting worse, not better, and the same handful of issues account for the vast majority of it.
| Issue | Share of home pages affected | What it means for a visitor |
|---|---|---|
| Low contrast text | 83.9% | Text too close in colour to its background is hard to read for anyone with low vision or colour blindness |
| Missing image alt text | 53.1% | A screen reader has nothing to announce, so a blind visitor has no idea what the image shows or why it’s there |
| Missing form labels | 51% | Screen reader users may not know what a contact or enquiry field is actually asking for |
| Empty links | 46.3% | A link with no text or label announces nothing useful, so its destination is a guess |
| Empty buttons | 30.6% | Same problem for interactive buttons, particularly common in menus and carousels |
| Missing document language | 13.5% | Screen readers can mispronounce an entire page if they don’t know what language it’s written in |
These six issues have stayed the most common failures for several years running, and none of them require rebuilding a site to fix. If your site runs on WordPress, our WordPress maintenance service includes technical audits and fixes that can address most of these as part of regular site management.
Quick Accessibility Checklist
- Body text meets a 4.5:1 contrast ratio against its background, checked with a free contrast checker rather than eyeballed
- Every meaningful image has descriptive alt text, and purely decorative images are marked so screen readers skip them
- Every form field has a proper label, not just placeholder text that disappears once someone starts typing
- Links and buttons describe their destination or action, not generic text like “click here” repeated across the page
- The whole site can be navigated using a keyboard alone, tab order included, with no dead ends at menus or pop-ups
- The page’s language is set correctly in the code, so screen readers pronounce it properly
- Any PDFs on the site are checked for accessibility, not just left as scanned images with no readable text layer
How to Check Whether Your Website Is Accessible
You do not need to spend money to get a basic read on where your site stands. WAVE by WebAIM (wave.webaim.org) is one of the most widely used free tools: enter your URL and it flags issues directly on the page, marking exactly where each problem sits. Google Lighthouse, built into Chrome’s developer tools, includes an accessibility audit as standard, scoring your page out of 100 with specific issues listed.
Neither tool gives the full picture. Automated checks typically catch around 30 to 40% of real accessibility problems; the rest need a person to test the site manually, using a keyboard and a screen reader, applying knowledge of WCAG criteria to what they find. Our web development team can carry out a thorough accessibility review and work through the fixes in priority order, starting with the issues affecting the most users.
Building Accessibility In, Rather Than Fixing It Later
Adding accessibility to an existing site is almost always more costly than building it in from the start. A site that was never designed with accessibility in mind often has structural issues deep in its code, and fixing them properly can mean changes across templates, stylesheets, and page builders site-wide.
If you’re planning a new site or a rebuild, make WCAG 2.2 AA a requirement before design work begins, not an afterthought raised at launch. Whoever builds it, an in-house team, a freelancer, or our web design team, should be briefed on colour contrast, heading structure, keyboard navigation, and form labelling from day one.
Accessibility is not a one-off job either. Sites change constantly as new content, images and functionality get added, and each addition can quietly introduce a new problem that was not there before. Periodic accessibility checks belong in regular website maintenance, alongside the security and performance checks most businesses already have in place.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does UK law require my business website to be accessible?
Yes, in most cases. The Equality Act 2010 requires businesses to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people, and that duty covers your website. Public sector organisations face stricter, specific requirements under the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018. If you sell to EU customers, the European Accessibility Act, enforceable since June 2025, may also apply, with penalties set individually by each EU member state rather than a single EU-wide fine.
What is WCAG and which level do I need?
WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, is the international standard for accessible web content. There are three compliance levels: A, AA, and AAA. Most UK businesses should target WCAG 2.2 Level AA, the level recognised in UK government guidance and required for public sector websites.
How do I know if my website has accessibility issues?
Start with a free tool such as WAVE (wave.webaim.org) or Google Lighthouse; both flag common problems like low contrast text, missing alt text, and unlabelled form fields. Automated tools only catch a portion of real issues, so a manual review by a developer using a keyboard and screen reader is needed for anything beyond a basic check.
Will making my site accessible change how it looks?
Not noticeably, if it’s done well. Most accessibility work is about structure and code rather than visual design. Better colour contrast makes text easier to read for everyone, not just people with visual impairments, and a good developer can build accessibility in without changing your branding.
Is making a website accessible expensive?
It depends where your site currently stands. Building accessibility in from the start of a new project adds very little to the overall cost. Fixing an existing site varies with how many issues exist and how deeply embedded they are. A basic review and a prioritised list of fixes is a practical, affordable starting point for most businesses.
What is the purple pound?
The purple pound is the collective spending power of disabled people and households with at least one disabled person in the UK, estimated at around £274 billion a year. Businesses that make their websites and services accessible can reach this market directly; competitors who don’t build accessibly cannot.
Not Sure Your Website Is Accessible?
Get a free consultation and find out where your site stands, and what a prioritised fix list would actually look like.
Your website should be open to everyone. Millions of disabled people in the UK represent billions in combined spending power, and the businesses that make it easy for them to connect, browse, and buy have an advantage that is hard for competitors to replicate. Whether you’re planning a new site or improving an existing one, an accessibility review is a practical place to start.
