What Is Website Accessibility and Do You Need to Comply?

Website accessibility is the practice of designing and building websites so that people with disabilities can use them effectively. This includes people with visual impairments who use screen readers, people with motor disabilities who navigate using a keyboard rather than a mouse, people with hearing impairments who need captions on videos, and people with cognitive disabilities who benefit from clear, plain-language content and consistent navigation.

Accessibility is both an ethical consideration and, increasingly, a legal one. Across the UK and EU, regulations are tightening around digital accessibility, and organisations that fail to meet basic accessibility standards face the risk of complaints and, in some sectors, legal action. But beyond compliance, accessible websites tend to be better websites for everyone — cleaner code, clearer content, and faster performance are accessibility best practices that benefit all visitors.

What Does Website Accessibility Involve?

The global standard for web accessibility is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), published by the W3C. WCAG 2.1 is the current widely adopted version, with WCAG 2.2 extending it further. The guidelines are organised around four principles — content must be Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust (POUR) — and are graded at three levels: A (minimum), AA (standard compliance target), and AAA (enhanced).

In practice, meeting WCAG 2.1 AA involves things like: providing alt text for all non-decorative images, ensuring sufficient colour contrast between text and background, making all interactive elements keyboard-navigable, providing captions or transcripts for video and audio content, labelling all form fields clearly, avoiding content that flashes more than three times per second (which can trigger seizures), and ensuring the page structure is logical when CSS is removed (so screen readers encounter content in the right order).

Who Is Required to Comply?

In the UK, the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) Accessibility Regulations 2018 require all UK public sector organisations — government bodies, councils, universities, NHS trusts, and similar — to meet WCAG 2.1 AA and publish an accessibility statement. This applies to both new and existing websites.

For private sector businesses, there is currently no standalone UK law mandating WCAG compliance. However, the Equality Act 2010 requires organisations to make reasonable adjustments to avoid discriminating against people with disabilities, and this extends to digital services. A website that is genuinely unusable by someone with a disability could be considered a failure to make reasonable adjustments. EU legislation (the European Accessibility Act, effective June 2025) is more prescriptive and covers a wider range of private sector digital products and services sold within the EU, which affects UK businesses trading with EU customers.

How to Improve Your Website’s Accessibility

Start with an automated audit. Tools like Google Lighthouse (built into Chrome DevTools), Axe, and WAVE will identify common accessibility issues quickly and explain how to fix them. Automated tools catch around 30–40% of accessibility issues — the remainder require manual testing, including navigating the site using only a keyboard and testing with a free screen reader such as NVDA (Windows) or VoiceOver (Mac and iOS).

The highest-impact improvements for most websites are: adding alt text to images, fixing insufficient colour contrast, adding visible focus indicators for keyboard navigation, labelling form fields with <label> elements, and ensuring heading levels (H1, H2, H3) follow a logical hierarchy. At Xpose in Norwich, accessibility is part of the standard web design build process — it’s far more cost-effective to build accessibly from the start than to retrofit compliance onto an existing site later.