What the law expects from a small business website, and what customers notice

UK accessibility law for private businesses is shorter than most people expect, and the practical checklist is longer. The law asks you to make reasonable adjustments. The checklist tells you what that looks like on a screen.

This post is general information and not legal advice. If you have a specific concern, such as a complaint or a contract, speak to a solicitor.

What the law expects

The Equality Act 2010 applies to anyone providing a service to the public, which includes a shop, a restaurant, a clinic or a trades business. You must not discriminate against disabled people, and you must make reasonable adjustments so that they can use your service. Your website is part of that service.

Three points are worth knowing.

• The duty is anticipatory. You do not wait for someone to complain before making a site usable. You think ahead about the barriers disabled people are likely to meet.
• The Act does not mention websites or name a technical standard. What is reasonable depends on the circumstances, including the size and resources of the business, so the bar for a local trades firm differs from the bar for a bank. Being small is not a blanket excuse either.
• It is ongoing. A site checked in 2023 and since changed has to be checked again.

Public sector sites fall under separate regulations that also require an accessibility statement, and those do not apply to a private business. Separate rules may apply if you sell to customers in the EU, which is a question for a solicitor.

Who actually benefits

Disabled customers are the reason for the duty, and they are far from the only people who notice. Someone squinting at a phone in sunlight on the towpath needs good contrast. Someone holding a child in one arm needs a button big enough to hit with a thumb. Someone with a broken wrist, or a trackpad that has given up, ends up using the keyboard. Older eyes appreciate text that can be enlarged without the page falling apart. Fix the barrier for one group and it usually gets easier for all of them.

WCAG 2.2 AA as the practical standard

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG, are published by the W3C. Version 2.2 appeared in October 2023. They have three conformance levels, A, AA and AAA, and Level AA is the usual target. The Equality Act does not require it by name. It is simply the reference most people use when they ask whether a website is accessible, so it is the sensible yardstick to work to.

The guidelines rest on four ideas. Content must be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust, which means it works with different browsers and assistive technology. Version 2.2 added criteria for a minimum size for tap targets, keeping the focused item visible, and not making people re-enter information they have already given.

The common failures

Most of the problems we find on small business sites come from the same five places.

Contrast

Normal text needs a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 against its background. Large text and interface parts such as input borders and button outlines need at least 3 to 1. The usual offenders are pale grey text on white, text laid over a photograph, placeholder text inside form fields, and brand colours chosen for a logo and never tested for reading. Put your colours through a contrast checker and adjust the shade.

Alt text

An image that carries information needs a short text description, so a screen reader user hears what a sighted visitor sees. A decorative image gets an empty description so it is skipped. Do not begin with image of, and do not stuff keywords. Text that sits inside an image, such as a menu photographed and uploaded, cannot be read by anyone using a screen reader, and by Google only with difficulty. Put it on the page as text.

Keyboard use

Some people cannot use a mouse. Put your mouse aside and press Tab. Every link, button and field should be reachable in a sensible order, and you should always see where you are. Menus that open only on hover, carousels with no pause control, pop-ups that trap focus and sliders that cannot be reached by key are the typical failures. Add a skip link at the top so keyboard users can jump past the navigation.

Forms

Forms are where a visitor becomes an enquiry, so they deserve the most care.

• Give every field a visible label. A placeholder that disappears on typing is not a label.
• Say what went wrong in words, next to the field, and not only with a red outline.
• Mark required fields clearly.
• Let the browser fill in names, emails and addresses.
• Make buttons and fields large enough to hit with a thumb.
• Test any date picker or booking widget by keyboard, because they are the most frequent failure.

Headings and structure

Screen reader users move through a page by its headings, much as sighted visitors scan. Use one H1, then H2s for the main sections and H3s below them, in order. Choose headings that describe what follows. Make links make sense out of context, so read our menu beats click here. Real lists should be marked up as lists, and each page needs a distinct title and a language set in the code.

Media and motion

Videos need captions, so people who cannot hear them, or who are watching on a train with the sound off, still get the content. Anything that moves for more than a few seconds, such as a rotating banner, needs a way to pause it. Respect the setting some visitors use to reduce motion. Avoid flashing content altogether. The page should also still work when zoomed to 200 per cent or viewed on a narrow phone, with nothing cut off or overlapping.

Documents

PDF menus, price lists and brochures are part of your site, and they fail more often than the pages do. A scanned PDF is a picture of text. Where you can, put the content on a page as ordinary text, and keep the PDF as an extra for people who want to print it. If you do publish a PDF, make it from a properly structured source document with real headings and text, and not from a photograph.

Where accessibility meets speed and SEO

Google does not list accessibility as a ranking factor, and the work overlaps with what it does reward. Clean headings and descriptive links help a search engine understand a page. Alt text describes images it cannot see. Captions and transcripts turn spoken content into text it can index. Setting image sizes fixes layout shift, which stops the page jumping under someone's finger and is one of the speed metrics too. A page with fewer scripts is faster and easier for assistive technology to read.

If you want to see the speed side in detail, page speed for small business websites sets out the numbers. Clear writing helps in the same way, and writing service pages people actually read covers it. In short, the HTML that passes an audit is also the HTML a search engine can read.

What to ask whoever builds your site

If you are commissioning a new site or checking an existing supplier, a few plain questions tell you a lot.

• Which version of WCAG, and which level, are you building to?
• How do you test? The answer should include a manual check with the keyboard and a screen reader, and not only an automated scan.
• Does that cover the theme, the plug-ins and the booking or payment widget, or only the pages you wrote?
• What will you give me at the end, such as a short list of known issues?
• Who re-tests after changes, and how often?

A supplier who has done this before will answer in a few sentences. One who has not will talk about an overlay.

Be wary of overlays

You will see widgets that promise instant compliance with one line of code. They sit on top of the page and do not repair the markup underneath, and many disabled users find them intrusive. Automated tools of any kind find only a portion of the problems on a page. Fix the source, and treat any claim of automatic compliance as a reason for caution.

A half-hour test

1. Press Tab through your home page and your enquiry page. Note anything you cannot reach or cannot see.
2. Zoom the browser to 200 per cent and open the site on your phone. Look for anything cut off or overlapping.
3. Run an automated checker such as WAVE, axe or the Lighthouse accessibility audit. A clean result is a start and not a pass.
4. Check your brand colours in a contrast checker.
5. Try one task with a screen reader. VoiceOver is built into Macs and iPhones, and NVDA is free for Windows.
6. Complete the enquiry or booking form using the keyboard alone.
7. Write down what you found and fix the problems that stop someone completing a task first.

Say what you have done

A short accessibility statement is not a legal requirement for a private business, but it is useful. Say which standard you work to, what is not yet perfect, and how to reach you if something does not work. Offer another way to book or ask a question, such as an email address, for anyone who gets stuck.

Accessibility decays when a site changes, so build re-testing into every redesign and every new plug-in. That is part of how we build in web design, and our care and hosting plan includes a monthly health check to catch drift.

Start with the Tab key. It takes two minutes and the results are rarely flattering.