If your website isn't accessible, you might be breaking the law. That's not scaremongering; it's a straightforward reading of legislation that's been in place for over a decade and is now being enforced more actively than ever.
Most business owners we speak to across Hertfordshire, Essex, and the wider South East are vaguely aware that accessibility matters but unclear on what's actually required of them. This guide cuts through the jargon and gives you a practical understanding of where you stand.
The legal framework
Two main pieces of legislation govern website accessibility for UK businesses.
The Equality Act 2010 applies to every business that provides goods or services to the public. It requires organisations to make reasonable adjustments to prevent disabled people from being placed at a substantial disadvantage. Courts have consistently interpreted this to include digital services, which means your website.
This isn't new legislation waiting to be tested. There's established case law confirming that websites fall within scope. If a disabled person cannot access your website and a reasonable adjustment could have been made, you're potentially liable.
The Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) Accessibility Regulations 2018 goes further for public sector organisations, explicitly mandating compliance with WCAG 2.2 at Level AA and requiring a published accessibility statement. If you're a public body or provide services on behalf of one, this applies directly to you.
The European Accessibility Act
The European Accessibility Act came into force in June 2025, and while the UK is no longer in the EU, it still matters for many British businesses.
If you sell products or services to customers in EU member states — whether that's e-commerce, financial services, travel, ticketing, or telecommunications — you may need to comply with the EAA's requirements. This applies to the digital interfaces your EU customers use, including your website.
The EAA covers a broad range of sectors: e-commerce platforms, banking and financial services, transport and travel booking, ticketing services, utilities, and electronic communications. If your business operates in any of these areas and serves EU customers, it's worth understanding your obligations.
What WCAG 2.2 AA actually requires
WCAG stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and version 2.2 at Level AA is the standard that UK law points to. It sounds technical, but the requirements translate into practical design and development decisions.
Perceivable. All content must be available to users regardless of how they perceive information. This means text alternatives for images, captions for videos, sufficient colour contrast (at least 4.5:1 for normal text), and content that works without relying solely on colour to convey meaning.
Operable. Everything on your site must work with a keyboard, not just a mouse. Navigation must be logical and predictable. Users must have enough time to read and interact with content. Nothing should flash in ways that could trigger seizures. Focus indicators must be clearly visible so keyboard users always know where they are on the page.
Understandable. Content must be readable and predictable. Forms must have clear labels and helpful error messages. Navigation must be consistent across pages. The language of the page must be specified in the code so screen readers pronounce it correctly.
Robust. Your site's code must work with current and future assistive technologies. This means clean, semantic HTML, proper use of ARIA labels where needed, and valid markup that screen readers and other tools can interpret reliably.
What non-compliance actually costs
Discrimination claims under the Equality Act can result in unlimited compensation awards. In practice, injury to feelings awards typically range from £900 to £45,000, on top of actual damages and mandatory remediation costs.
But the financial risk extends beyond litigation. The Equality and Human Rights Commission has the power to investigate and take enforcement action. And increasingly, businesses are finding that inaccessible websites simply lose customers — roughly 20% of the UK population has some form of disability, and they control significant spending power.
Then there's the reputational cost. In an era where corporate responsibility is scrutinised publicly, being found to have an inaccessible website is not a good look.
Common accessibility failures we see
When we audit websites for businesses in our area, the same issues come up repeatedly:
Missing alt text on images. Screen readers can't describe an image if nobody's told the code what it shows. Every meaningful image needs descriptive alternative text.
Poor colour contrast. Light grey text on a white background might look elegant, but it's unreadable for anyone with low vision — and there are more people with low vision than most businesses realise.
No keyboard navigation. If you can't tab through your site's navigation, forms, and interactive elements using only a keyboard, it's inaccessible to anyone who can't use a mouse. This includes people with motor impairments and many screen reader users.
Unlabelled form fields. A contact form where the labels disappear when you start typing (placeholder-only labels) is a usability problem for everyone and a genuine barrier for screen reader users.
Missing heading structure. Screen reader users navigate by headings. If your page jumps from an H1 to an H4 or uses headings purely for visual styling rather than content structure, navigation becomes confusing.
Auto-playing media. Videos or audio that play automatically are disorienting for screen reader users and problematic for people with cognitive disabilities. Always let the user choose when to play media.
What you should do about it
Here's a practical action plan for most UK businesses:
Get an audit. You can't fix what you haven't measured. A proper accessibility audit against WCAG 2.2 AA will identify your specific issues and prioritise them by severity. We do this for clients as part of our web development process, but there are also specialist accessibility consultancies if you want an independent assessment.
Fix the critical issues first. Not every accessibility issue is equally urgent. Missing alt text, broken keyboard navigation, and insufficient colour contrast are the highest-impact problems and often the easiest to fix.
Build accessibility into new work. If you're planning a website redesign, accessibility should be in the brief from day one, not bolted on at the end. Retrofitting accessibility is always more expensive and less effective than designing for it from the start.
Write an accessibility statement. Even if you're not legally required to publish one (public sector bodies are), it demonstrates good faith. State your commitment, the standard you're working to, and how users can report issues.
Test with real users. Automated testing tools catch roughly 30% of accessibility issues. The rest require human testing, ideally including people who actually use assistive technologies. Even basic testing with a screen reader and keyboard-only navigation will reveal problems that automated scans miss.
How we approach accessibility
At Supra Digital, accessibility is built into our development process rather than treated as a final checklist. Our modern stack (Next.js with Payload CMS) produces clean, semantic HTML by default, which gives us a solid foundation that many legacy platforms don't provide.
We test against WCAG 2.2 AA throughout development, not just at the end. We use both automated tools and manual testing, and we build accessible patterns into our component library so they're consistent across every site we produce.
If your current website has accessibility gaps, or if you're planning a new build and want accessibility done properly from the start, we'd be happy to discuss your specific situation. We work with businesses across Hertfordshire, Essex, Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, and London, and we believe every business website should be usable by everyone.