Is website accessibility a legal requirement for UK businesses?
What the Equality Act 2010 and the 2018 public sector regulations actually require of UK websites, what WCAG 2.2 AA means, and where the real risk sits.
Website accessibility is a legal requirement in the UK, but the obligation reaches different organisations through different routes. Public sector bodies are bound by the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018, which require conformance with WCAG 2.2 level AA and a published accessibility statement. Private businesses are bound instead by the Equality Act 2010, which requires providers of services to the public to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people. The Act names no technical standard and does not mention websites specifically, which is why the position is often misreported as “accessibility is not required for private companies”. The duty exists; only the specification is left open, and WCAG 2.2 AA is the accepted way of meeting it.
What WCAG 2.2 AA actually asks for
WCAG is organised around four principles: content must be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. Level AA is the middle of three conformance levels and the one regulators, procurement processes and grant conditions ask for. In practice the criteria that catch most sites are:
- Text contrast of at least 4.5:1 against its background, and 3:1 for large text and meaningful non-text elements.
- Everything operable by keyboard alone, with a visible focus indicator.
- Form fields with real labels, and errors described in text rather than colour.
- Content that survives 200% zoom without loss.
- Motion that respects a user’s reduced-motion preference.
Where the real risk sits
For a small business the realistic exposure is not a regulator. It is a customer who cannot complete your enquiry form, and who has a route to complain about it. The practical cost is usually reputational and remedial rather than a penalty.
There is also a commercial dimension people underrate. Around one in five people in the UK reports a disability. A form that cannot be completed by keyboard excludes customers silently — they leave, and you never learn why.
Why overlays do not solve it
Overlay widgets promise conformance from a single line of JavaScript. They do not deliver it. Accessibility is a property of the underlying markup: whether a heading is a heading, whether a control is reachable, whether an image’s description is meaningful. A script cannot infer any of that reliably, and disabled users have been consistent and public in objecting to these tools.
What to do if your site is not accessible
Audit before you rebuild. A manual pass with a keyboard and a screen reader, combined with automated checks, produces a list of failures mapped to specific success criteria. Order that list by severity and by how many users each issue affects, then fix downward. Automated tooling alone catches only around a third of real barriers, so an audit sold as fully automated is incomplete by construction.
Then publish an accessibility statement — including what is not yet conformant. An honest statement with known limitations is worth more than a claim of full compliance nobody has tested.