UK website accessibility law: what the Equality Act asks of your site

Website accessibility law in the UK rests on the Equality Act 2010 for every business and on the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018 for the public sector. The Equality Act does not name a technical standard, but it requires any business that provides goods or services to the public to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people, in advance, and a website is one of the ways it provides them. In practice the benchmark is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines at level AA.

About a quarter of people in the UK report a disability, and many more use a screen reader, magnification or a keyboard some of the time. A site they cannot use loses them as customers before it becomes a legal question. This guide sets out what each UK law asks, how it is enforced, where it differs from the EU and the US rules a UK site also meets when it sells abroad, and what to do first.

The Equality Act and your website

Part 3 of the Equality Act 2010 covers anyone who provides services to the public, paid or free, in Great Britain; Northern Ireland has its own disability legislation with a similar duty. Three parts of it matter for a website:

• The duty to make reasonable adjustments(sections 20 and 29). Where a feature of your service puts disabled people at a substantial disadvantage, you take reasonable steps to remove it, or to provide the service another way.
• The duty is anticipatoryYou do not wait for a disabled customer to complain; you think ahead about the barriers people with common impairments will meet. For a website that means building it so that screen reader users, keyboard users and people who enlarge text can use it.
• Reasonable depends on youCourts weigh how effective a step would be, how practicable, what it costs against your resources, and the disruption it causes. A large online retailer is expected to do more than a sole trader, but nobody is expected to do nothing.

The Act does not mention WCAG. The Equality and Human Rights Commission's guidance and the public sector rules point to it, and anyone advising on a claim will measure your site against WCAG 2.2 level AA, the current version.

Claims over websites have been rare in the UK compared with the United States: there is no statutory damages regime like California's, and many complaints settle quietly. One of the few public cases came in January 2012, when the RNIB backed two blind customers in a county court claim against the airline bmibaby, whose booking site they could not use; within months the airline changed the site so blind customers could book. Rare is not the same as safe, and the commercial cost of locking out customers comes first.

The public sector regulations

The Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018 apply to central and local government, the NHS, universities, and charities that are mostly publicly funded or provide essential public services. They require websites and apps to meet WCAG 2.2 AA, subject to legal exemptions, and to publish an accessibility statement that says how accessible the service is, what is not and why, and how to report a problem. The Government Digital Service monitors a sample of public sector sites each year on behalf of the Cabinet Office; the EHRC enforces in Great Britain and the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland in Northern Ireland.

Private companies are not covered, with one exception that catches suppliers: when a private company builds or runs a website for a public body, the public body remains responsible, and its contract will pass the WCAG 2.2 AA requirement on to the supplier.

Selling abroad: two more rulebooks

A UK site that sells to customers in the EU or the US meets rules that are stricter on paper than the Equality Act.

The European Accessibility Act follows the customer: a UK shop that sells to consumers in Ireland, France or Germany falls under the law of each of those countries for those sales, including the accessibility statement and the national authority. The details are in our guide to the European Accessibility Act, and Germany's version in the German Accessibility Act. What else changes when a UK shop sells into the EU is in selling to the EU from the UK.

In the US, the risk is litigation: over 3,000 federal lawsuits a year over websites, mostly against online shops. See ADA website compliance and our research on ADA website lawsuits.

The practical answer is one standard for all three: build to WCAG 2.2 AA, which meets the UK benchmark and exceeds what the EU and US currently reference.

What to fix first on a UK site

Start where a barrier costs you a customer or a claim:

1. The path to the sale or the booking. Product search, product page, basket, checkout, booking form: complete each with only a keyboard and with a screen reader such as VoiceOver or NVDA.
2. Forms. Labels that stay visible, error messages that say what went wrong, no image CAPTCHA.
3. Contrast and zoom. Text at 4.5 to 1 against its background, and a page that still works at 200 percent zoom and on a 320-pixel-wide screen.
4. Templates. Fix the header, the product card and the pop-up once, and the fix reaches every page.
5. A way to ask for help. A clear contact route for anyone who cannot use part of the site; the Equality Act expects you to offer the service another way when a barrier remains.
6. A statement. Not required for a private UK business, but cheap to write and required for your EU sales anyway; our accessibility statement template has a UK version.

When a customer tells you something does not work

How you respond to the first complaint matters more under the Equality Act than the state of the site on the day. Acknowledge it quickly and in the format the customer used. Offer the service another way at once: an order by phone or email, a document in another format, an appointment booked for them. Find the barrier in the template, not only on the page they used, and fix it. Record what you did and when. A business that can show it responded, offered an alternative and fixed the cause is in a far stronger position than one that waited for a solicitor's letter.