Web accessibility is an area that most organisations get wrong. This guide covers the legal position, what best practice looks like, and the specific things you need to get right - with links to the tools and resources worth keeping to hand.
Web accessibility is one of those topics that a lot of organisations know they should be doing something about, but aren’t quite sure where to begin. The standards and legislation can feel technical, the testing tools are unfamiliar, and it’s easy to assume it’s a job for developers rather than something the whole organisation has a stake in.
This guide is intended to be a practical starting point – and a reference you can come back to. It covers the legal position for UK public sector organisations, what best practice looks like for everyone else, and the specific things you need to get right across text, images, navigation, forms and multimedia. We’ll keep adding to it as things change.
If you want to see these topics covered in more depth, we also ran a webinar on UK web accessibility which you can watch on YouTube.
The legal position
Public sector organisations
If you’re a public sector organisation, web accessibility is a legal requirement. The Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) Accessibility Regulations 2018 require all public sector websites and apps to meet WCAG 2.1 AA as a minimum.
Further to this, the government’s own guidance sets out what compliance looks like in practice. In short: audit against WCAG 2.2 AA, fix all Level A and AA failures, publish an accessibility statement, and put ongoing monitoring in place.
Private sector and other organisations
There is currently no equivalent legal requirement for private sector websites in the UK. However, the Equality Act 2010 does require organisations to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people – and an inaccessible website can fall foul of that, even without a specific accessibility regulation applying.
More practically, around one in five people in the UK has a disability. An inaccessible website is a website that excludes a significant portion of your potential audience. The case for accessibility isn’t just legal, it’s commercial.
Writing an accessibility statement
Public sector organisations are required to publish an accessibility statement. The government’s guidance on what to include is clear, and there’s a sample statement you can use as a starting point. At minimum, the statement should cover:
- Your compliance status
- Any content that isn’t accessible and why
- Contact details for people who need accessible alternatives
- The enforcement procedure if someone isn’t satisfied with your response
- When the statement was prepared and last reviewed
Even if you’re not legally required to publish one, having an accessibility statement is a useful signal that you take this seriously.
Getting the basics right
Text and readability
The most common text accessibility failures are contrast and hierarchy. WCAG requires a minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1 between text and background – a ratio that a surprising number of websites don’t meet. Beyond contrast, the key requirements are:
- Text must be resizable to 200% without loss of functionality
- Colour must never be the only way meaning is conveyed
- Pages must declare their language in HTML
- Headings must follow a logical hierarchy (H1, H2, H3 in order – not chosen for visual size)
The GDS accessibility dos and don’ts are a useful quick reference here, covering not just text but design decisions across the board.
Images
Every image on your site needs to be handled intentionally from an accessibility perspective. Informative images – those that convey meaning – need descriptive alt text. Decorative images – those that are purely visual – should have empty alt text (alt=””) so screen readers skip them. Complex graphics such as charts or infographics need longer descriptions that convey the same information as the visual.
The W3C’s images tutorial is the most thorough practical guide to getting this right.
Navigation
Accessible navigation means your site can be used by someone who can’t use a mouse. Full keyboard operability is a WCAG requirement, and it catches a lot of organisations out – particularly around dropdown menus, modals and custom interactive components.
The key requirements are:
- All functionality must be operable via keyboard
- Focus states must be visible (you need to be able to see where you are on the page when tabbing)
- Skip links should allow keyboard users to jump past repeated navigation
- Link text must be descriptive – “click here” and “read more” tell a screen reader user nothing
- Navigation must be consistent across pages
The W3C’s navigation tutorial covers the technical implementation in detail.
Forms
Forms are one of the highest-risk areas for accessibility failures, and also one of the most impactful to get right – a form that can’t be completed is a direct barrier to conversion.
The requirements come down to four things: every field must have an explicit label associated with it (not just placeholder text, which disappears), required fields must be clearly marked, error messages must identify the problem and suggest how to fix it, and the tab order must be logical.
The W3C’s forms tutorial is worth bookmarking if your site has complex forms or multi-step processes.
Multimedia
If your site includes video or audio content, captions and audio descriptions are a WCAG requirement. Prerecorded video needs captions. Prerecorded video with meaningful visual content that isn’t conveyed in the audio needs audio description.
This is an area where a lot of organisations are non-compliant without realising it – particularly those who use video on landing pages or in product demonstrations. The W3C’s media accessibility guidance is the most comprehensive resource.
Cognitive accessibility
Accessibility isn’t only about screen readers and keyboard navigation. Cognitive accessibility – making content understandable and predictable for people with cognitive or learning differences – is a WCAG requirement too. This is also likely to be a crucial part of the upcoming changes at WCAG with the draft version of 3.0.
In practice this means: navigation and labelling must be consistent across the site, interactions must behave predictably, and content should be written as clearly as possible. Plain language isn’t just good practice – it’s an accessibility consideration.
W3C has a document on making content usable for people with cognitive and learning disabilities. This goes considerably further than the WCAG criteria alone and is worth reading if cognitive accessibility is a priority for your organisation.
PDFs
PDFs deserve a separate mention because they’re often an afterthought, and an inaccessible PDF is just as much a barrier as an inaccessible web page. This is an area we get a lot of questions on, because it is more technical than others and often catches organisations out.
If you’re creating new PDFs, structure and tagging needs to be built in from the start – not added afterwards. If you have existing PDFs that need to be made accessible, AWS PDF Remediation is a useful tool. The Harvard University PDF Accessibility Guide is also one of the clearest practical guides available on what accessible PDFs require.
Testing your website
No accessibility audit is complete without a combination of automated and manual testing. Automated tools are fast and useful for catching common failures, but they can only identify around 30-40% of issues. Manual testing – including keyboard testing and screen reader testing – is essential.
Free tools worth using
We offer a free three-page accessibility audit using our tool Kindweb. It won’t cover your entire site, but it will identify priority issues and give you a clear sense of where you stand.
The WAVE browser extension is another free tool for identifying accessibility issues on any page, and Silktide and Siteimprove also both offer free browser extensions.
These are good starting points for getting a sense of where issues are. However, they’re not a substitute for a full audit – if they don’t show any errors, that does not mean they do not exist.
Where to go from here
Accessibility isn’t a one-time fix. Standards evolve, content changes, and new features get added. The organisations that handle it well are the ones that treat it as an ongoing part of how they manage their digital presence – not a project with an end date. Whether you are trying to ensure you are compliant with the requirements, or you want to ensure your entire website audience can fully use your website, you need to have an accessibility strategy in place to support this.
If you want to stay on top of developments, our accessibility blog covers updates, guidance and practical tips as things change.
The full list of resources referenced in this guide – and from our recent webinar – is below.
Resources
UK legislation and guidance
- Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018
- UK government accessibility requirements guidance
- Accessibility statement guidance
- Sample accessibility statement
- GDS accessibility dos and don’ts
Standards
W3C tutorials and guidance
- WAI introduction to accessibility
- Images tutorial
- Forms tutorial
- Navigation tutorial
- Media accessibility
- Making content usable for people with cognitive and learning disabilities
