Website Accessibility — What UK Businesses Need to Know

Website accessibility means designing and building websites that can be used by people with disabilities — including visual impairments, hearing impairments, motor disabilities and cognitive differences. In the UK, the Equality Act 2010 requires businesses providing services to the public to make reasonable adjustments to ensure disabled people are not put at a disadvantage. This includes digital services such as websites.

Beyond legal compliance, accessible websites typically rank better in Google, convert more visitors and are easier to maintain. The overlap between accessibility best practice and SEO best practice is substantial — most improvements benefit both.

UK legal requirements for website accessibility

The Equality Act 2010 applies to most UK businesses providing goods or services to the public, including via websites. Public sector bodies have stricter requirements under the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018, which mandate compliance with WCAG 2.1 AA. Private sector businesses are not subject to the same statutory standard, but the Equality Act still creates potential liability for websites that are inaccessible in ways that constitute discrimination.

In practice, claims related to website accessibility are relatively rare in the UK private sector. The stronger driver for most businesses is that accessibility improvements overlap with good design and SEO practice — making the site better for everyone, including the roughly one in five people in the UK who have some form of disability.

The most common accessibility failures and how to fix them

Missing alt text on images is the most widespread accessibility failure. Screen readers — used by people with visual impairments — announce the alt text of images when reading a page aloud. An image with no alt text is invisible to a screen reader user. Every informational image should have a descriptive alt text; purely decorative images should have empty alt text (alt="") to tell screen readers to ignore them.

Insufficient colour contrast is the second most common issue. Text that has low contrast against its background is difficult to read for people with low vision or colour blindness. The WCAG AA standard requires a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text. WebAIM's contrast checker is a free tool that tests any colour combination against the standard. Many website themes fail this test with default colour choices.

Accessibility improvements that also help SEO

Proper heading structure — using H1, H2, and H3 tags in logical hierarchy rather than for visual styling — helps both screen reader navigation and Google's understanding of page structure. Descriptive link text — "read our web design guide" rather than "click here" — helps screen reader users understand where links go and gives Google context for the linked page. Transcripts for video and audio content help deaf users and are also indexed by Google.

Page titles and meta descriptions that clearly describe the page content help screen readers announce what a page is about before a user navigates into it, and help Google understand and display your pages accurately in search results. Accessible forms with properly labelled fields help all users complete them correctly and reduce abandonment — directly benefiting conversion rates.