Roughly one in five people in the UK has a disability. A meaningful share of them will fail to use a typical business website — not because it is hostile, but because nobody checked.
Here is what the law asks of you, what the standard means in practice, and the short list of changes that resolves most of it.
The legal position, briefly
If you are a private business, the relevant law is the Equality Act 2010. It requires you to make reasonable adjustments so that disabled people are not put at a substantial disadvantage when using your services. Services delivered through a website are covered.
"Reasonable" is deliberately not defined as a technical standard. It scales with your size and resources: what is reasonable for a national retailer differs from what is reasonable for a six-person firm. What is not reasonable anywhere is having never considered it.
If you are a public sector body, or supply one, separate regulations apply. They name WCAG 2.2 level AA explicitly and require a published accessibility statement. Suppliers are increasingly asked to meet the same bar contractually.
What WCAG actually asks for
The guidelines are organised around four ideas, and they are more approachable than the documentation suggests.
Perceivable. Content must be available to senses the visitor has. Images need text alternatives, video needs captions, and information must not be conveyed by colour alone.
Operable. Everything must work without a mouse. Keyboard users, switch users and voice control users all depend on this.
Understandable. Predictable navigation, clear labels, and errors explained in words rather than a red outline.
Robust. Built so assistive technology can interpret it — which mostly means using correct HTML rather than reinventing buttons out of styled divs.
The fixes that resolve most failures
Colour contrast
The most common failure by a distance, and usually inherited from a brand palette chosen on a designer's calibrated screen. Light grey text on white looks refined and is unreadable in sunlight or with reduced vision.
Body text needs a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1. Free checkers will tell you in seconds, and the fix is usually a darker shade of a colour you already use.
Alternative text on images
Describe what the image conveys, not what it contains. A photograph of an engineer at a switch cabinet is "an engineer installing network cabling", not "IMG_4471". Purely decorative images should carry empty alt text so screen readers skip them rather than announcing a filename.
Form labels
Every field needs a real label, properly associated with the input. Placeholder text is not a label — it disappears the moment someone starts typing, and it is invisible to some assistive technology. This one change fixes most contact forms.
Heading structure
One H1 per page, then H2 and H3 in order, describing the actual structure. Screen reader users navigate by heading the way sighted users skim. Headings chosen for their font size rather than their meaning break that entirely.
Keyboard navigation
Unplug your mouse and try to complete your contact form using only Tab, Enter and the arrow keys. If you cannot reach the menu, or you cannot see where you are, you have found a real problem. A visible focus outline is required and is frequently removed by designers who find it ugly.
Link text that means something
"Click here" and "read more" are useless out of context, and assistive technology routinely lists links out of context. "Read our pricing guide" works everywhere.
Almost every accessibility problem on a small business site falls into six categories, and five of them are fixed by a developer in an afternoon.
On overlay tools
Products that promise compliance from one line of JavaScript are, at best, incomplete. They are widely criticised by the disabled users they claim to serve, and installing one does not remove the underlying failures — it adds a layer over them.
Spend the money on fixing contrast, labels and keyboard support instead. The result is permanent.
How to check where you stand
- Run an automated checker such as WAVE or Lighthouse. It will catch perhaps a third of issues — worth doing, not sufficient.
- Do the keyboard test on your three most important journeys.
- Zoom to 200% and see whether the site still works.
- Turn on your phone's screen reader and try the homepage. Uncomfortable and educational.
- Ask somebody who uses assistive technology daily. Nothing substitutes for this.
Why it is worth doing beyond compliance
Accessible sites are better sites. Clear headings help search engines. Good contrast helps everyone outdoors. Keyboard support helps power users. Captions help people watching without sound, which is most people on a phone.
And the commercial argument is straightforward: an inaccessible checkout loses customers silently. They do not complain — they buy elsewhere.
Our web development team builds to WCAG 2.2 AA as standard and audits existing sites against it. Ask us for an accessibility review if you would like to know where yours stands.
