The accessibility rules that already apply to you

Roughly one adult in five in the UK has a disability. Not all of them affect how somebody uses a website, but a great many do: low vision, colour blindness, tremor, arthritis, dyslexia, hearing loss, and the ordinary decline in eyesight that arrives for almost everybody somewhere in their forties.

That last one deserves a moment, because it reframes the whole subject. The person who cannot read your 13-pixel grey-on-grey body text is not a rare edge case you are generously accommodating. She is fifty-four, she has the money, and she is exactly the customer a kitchen company or a private dental practice most wants.

Accessibility is not a minority provision. It is the readable version of your website.

Is website accessibility a legal requirement in the UK?

The Equality Act 2010 requires service providers to make reasonable adjustments so that disabled people are not put at a substantial disadvantage. It is not written in terms of websites, and that is precisely the point — it is written in terms of services, and your website is how you deliver a service to somebody deciding whether to ring you.

There is no register, no inspection, and no certificate. Enforcement comes from individuals, and in practice it very rarely reaches a tribunal for a small business. So if you are looking for the sentence that says you will be fined, it is not here.

The argument is a different one. The duty is real, the standard is knowable, and meeting it costs nothing extra if it is done while the site is being built. It only becomes expensive when it is retrofitted.

What is WCAG 2.2 AA, and why ask for it by name?

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are the international standard, and they come in three levels: A, AA and AAA. AA is the level everyone means when they say "accessible". AAA is not intended to be met in full across a whole site and any agency promising it is describing something they have not read.

The current version is WCAG 2.2, published in October 2023. It added criteria that matter a lot on a phone: making sure the thing you have tabbed to is not hidden behind a sticky header, making tap targets at least 24 by 24 pixels, and not requiring dragging for anything that could be done with a tap.

If you are getting a site built, "WCAG 2.2 AA" is the phrase to put in writing. Not "accessible", which means nothing, and not "WCAG compliant", which does not specify a version and so is easily satisfied by a standard from 2008.

What are the most common accessibility failures?

• Contrast. Light grey text on white looks refined on a designer's calibrated monitor and disappears entirely on a phone held at arm's length in a car park. Body text needs a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1. This is the single most common failure and the easiest to fix.
• Unlabelled form fields. If the only indication of what a box is for is placeholder text inside it, a screen reader announces four unnamed boxes, and the placeholder vanishes the moment anyone starts typing. Everyone loses, not only the screen reader user.
• Images with no alternative text. Decorative images should be marked as decorative. Meaningful ones need a description. A gallery of forty finished kitchens with no alt text is forty pieces of evidence Google cannot read either.
• Nothing works from the keyboard. Try it. Put your mouse down and press Tab through your own site. If you cannot see where you are, or cannot reach the menu, neither can anybody who navigates that way.
• Video with no captions. Captions serve deaf users, and they also serve the far larger group watching with the sound off on a train.

Do accessibility overlay widgets work?

You may be offered a widget — a small script that adds an accessibility button to the corner of your site, promising compliance for a monthly fee.

Be careful. Accessibility practitioners and disability organisations have been consistently critical of these tools, and there have been legal actions in the United States against businesses using them. The reason is straightforward: an overlay sits on top of a site and tries to guess at meaning it cannot see. It cannot know what your photograph is of, and it cannot invent a label for a field that has none.

Worse, several of them interfere with the screen readers that disabled users have already configured to their own preferences. A tool that fights the assistive technology someone already relies on is not an improvement.

The fix is in the markup. There is no shortcut, and the good news is that it is not expensive when it is done at the point of building.

What does accessibility cost to get right?

Built in from the start: nothing. It is a habit, not a feature. Correct heading order, real labels, sufficient contrast and declared image dimensions cost a developer no additional time once they are how that developer works.

Retrofitted onto a site built without it: anywhere from a day to a rebuild, depending on how much of the problem is structural. Which is the actual argument for asking about it before you commission, rather than after.

Every site we build ships to WCAG 2.2 AA as standard, and it is not a line item. The standard does not change because the client is smaller. Only the budget does.

Questions we get asked