Around one in five people in the UK has a disability — visual, hearing, motor or cognitive. If your website is hard for them to use, you are excluding a sizeable share of your potential customers, and you may be falling short of your legal duties without realising it. Yet accessibility is widely misunderstood, wrapped in jargon and treated as an optional extra.
It is none of those things. This plain-English guide explains what accessibility means, what UK law expects, and the practical steps any business can take to get it right.
What accessibility actually means
An accessible website is one that everyone can use, including people who rely on assistive technology. That might mean someone using a screen reader because they are blind, navigating by keyboard because they cannot use a mouse, or needing strong colour contrast to read comfortably. Accessibility is simply about not putting up barriers — and good accessibility usually makes a site clearer and easier for everyone.
What UK law expects
The headline point is the Equality Act 2010, which requires businesses to make 'reasonable adjustments' so they do not discriminate against disabled people. This applies to your website as a service, just as it applies to a physical shop. Public sector bodies face stricter, specific accessibility regulations and must meet a defined standard, but every organisation has duties under the Act.
In practice, 'reasonable adjustments' for a website means following recognised good practice — which brings us to WCAG.
Accessibility is not a niche concern. One in five of your potential customers may rely on it — and the rest benefit from the clarity it brings.
WCAG in plain English
WCAG — the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines — is the internationally recognised standard for accessible websites. The current benchmark most organisations aim for is WCAG 2.2 Level AA. You do not need to memorise it, but its principles are sensible and clear. A site should be:
- Perceivable — content can be seen or heard, with text alternatives for images and good colour contrast.
- Operable — everything works by keyboard as well as mouse, and nothing relies on fine motor control.
- Understandable — clear language, predictable navigation, helpful error messages.
- Robust — built so assistive technologies can interpret it reliably.
Practical steps you can take
Many improvements are straightforward and inexpensive:
- Add alt text to images so screen readers can describe them.
- Use strong colour contrast between text and background.
- Make sure everything works by keyboard, not just by mouse or touch.
- Write clear, descriptive link text rather than 'click here'.
- Use proper headings in order, so the page has a logical structure.
- Caption videos and provide transcripts.
- Label form fields clearly and flag errors helpfully.
The business case beyond compliance
Accessibility is not just risk-avoidance. It widens your reach to customers others overlook, improves usability for everyone — think captions watched on a noisy train — and supports your search visibility, because the same structure and descriptive text that help screen readers also help Google. Done well, accessibility and good SEO pull in the same direction.
Building it in versus retrofitting
The cheapest time to get accessibility right is when a site is built. Baking it into design and development from the start adds very little cost. Retrofitting an existing site takes more effort, but many high-impact fixes — contrast, alt text, headings, keyboard support — are quick wins you can start on today.
Find an agency that takes accessibility seriously
Not every agency treats accessibility as standard, so ask directly how they build to WCAG. Browse our directory to compare UK web design agencies, and shortlist those who can show they design inclusively from the outset — it protects your business and opens it up to more customers.