It’s not just for big companies
Under the Equality Act 2010, any organisation providing a service to the public has a duty not to discriminate against disabled users — and that includes your website. There’s no size or turnover exemption. A five-page site for a local plumber is covered by exactly the same principle as a national retailer’s. In practice, this means your site should be usable by someone who can’t see a screen well, can’t use a mouse, or relies on a screen reader to have pages read aloud to them.
What “accessible” actually means in practice
The general standard most businesses are measured against is WCAG 2.1 (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines), Level AA. That’s a mouthful, but the ideas behind it are simple. Text needs enough contrast against its background to be readable. Every image needs a short text description (“alt text”) so screen readers can describe it. People should be able to navigate the whole site using just a keyboard, not just a mouse. Videos need captions. Forms need clear labels, not just placeholder text that vanishes when you click into a box. None of this requires a website rebuild – most of it is fixable in an afternoon once someone knows what to look for.
Why this is becoming a live issue, not a theoretical one
For years, accessibility sat quietly on the “should probably get round to it” pile for most small businesses. That’s changing. Automated scanning tools now make it cheap and fast to check thousands of websites for common accessibility failures, and that’s led to a sharp rise in demand letters – a letter sent to a business, before any court case, flagging problems and asking for changes or payment. What used to land mainly on large retailers is increasingly reaching small and mid-size businesses too, precisely because they’re less likely to have checked. If you sell to customers in the EU as well as the UK, there’s a separate law, the European Accessibility Act, that applies more strictly to digital products and services – though very small businesses (under 10 staff and under roughly £1.7 million turnover) are exempt from parts of it.
Where to actually start
You don’t need an accessibility consultant or a big budget to make real progress. Start with the basics: check your text has enough contrast against its background (free online contrast checkers make this a two-minute job), make sure every important image has alt text describing what it shows, and try tabbing through your own site with just a keyboard to see if you can reach every link and button. If you’re using WordPress, several free plugins will scan your site and flag the most common issues automatically. Fixing the obvious problems first gets you most of the way there.
The takeaway
Accessibility isn’t about ticking a compliance box – it’s about making sure everyone who visits your site can actually use it, which is good for customers and good for business either way. You don’t need to overhaul your website overnight, but it’s worth finding out where the obvious gaps are before someone else points them out to you.
If your website could do with a proper look-over – accessibility included – our Website Design & Development team can review what you’ve got and put it right. Take a look at our Website Design & Development service.
