Website Accessibility (WCAG) for Small Businesses

Website accessibility means making sure people with disabilities can use your website: someone navigating with a keyboard because they cannot use a mouse, someone using a screen reader, someone zoomed to 200% or with colour vision deficiency. For a UK small business it matters for two reasons. Customers who cannot use your site go elsewhere, and the Equality Act 2010 expects service providers to make reasonable adjustments, which can include their website.

Most accessibility work is cheap when it is part of the build and expensive when it is retrofitted. This article covers what the law asks, what WCAG is, and what to check first.

What UK law says about website accessibility

There are three pieces of law worth knowing, and they apply differently.

In Northern Ireland the equivalent of the Equality Act duty sits in the Disability Discrimination Act 1995.

The Equality Act 2010

The Equality Act 2010 requires service providers to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people, and the duty is anticipatory: you are expected to think ahead rather than wait for a complaint. The Act does not say websites must meet WCAG, but WCAG is the established benchmark and is what would most likely be used to assess whether a site was reasonably accessible.

Public sector regulations

If you are a public sector body, or build sites for one, the GOV.UK guidance on accessibility requirements states that sites must meet WCAG 2.2 AA and publish an accessibility statement. Private businesses are not covered, but the guidance is a clear statement of what good looks like.

The European Accessibility Act

The European Accessibility Act (Directive 2019/882) has applied since 28 June 2025. It is not UK law, but it applies to businesses offering covered products and services, including eCommerce services, to consumers in EU member states, wherever the business is based. Microenterprises providing services, those with fewer than 10 staff and annual turnover or balance sheet total of no more than €2 million, are exempt from the service requirements. At the time of writing (October 2026), if you sell online to EU consumers and are above that size, take specific advice on whether you are covered.

This is general information, not legal advice.

What WCAG is

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are published by the W3C. The current version, WCAG 2.2, was published in October 2023. Its requirements are grouped under four principles:

1. Perceivable. People can perceive the content: text alternatives for images, captions for video, enough colour contrast.
2. Operable. People can use it: everything works with a keyboard, nothing traps focus, people have enough time.
3. Understandable. Content and behaviour are predictable: clear labels, helpful error messages, consistent navigation.
4. Robust. It works with assistive technologies: valid, semantic markup that screen readers can interpret.

Each requirement, called a success criterion, has a level: A, AA or AAA. Level AA is the target for almost every business website.

WCAG 2.2 added several criteria that particularly affect small business sites, including minimum target sizes for buttons and links, making sure focused elements are not hidden behind sticky headers or cookie banners, and avoiding login steps that rely on memory puzzles.

The checks that catch most problems

You can run most of these yourself in an afternoon:

1. Keyboard only. Put the mouse aside and press Tab through the whole page. Can you reach every link, button and form field? Can you see where focus is at every point?
2. Headings. Is there one H1, and do headings follow a logical order rather than being chosen for their size?
3. Images. Do meaningful images have alt text describing their purpose? Are decorative images marked so screen readers skip them?
4. Colour contrast. Is body text readable against its background? Light grey on white is the most common failure. Free contrast checkers will tell you.
5. Colour alone. Is any information shown only by colour, such as a red border on an error with no message?
6. Form labels. Does every field have a visible label, not just placeholder text that disappears when you type?
7. Error messages. When a form fails, does it say what went wrong and where?
8. Zoom. At 200% browser zoom, does the page still work without horizontal scrolling or overlapping text?
9. Link text. Does each link make sense out of context? A page full of 'read more' links is unusable with a screen reader's link list.
10. Video and audio. Are there captions, and can autoplaying media be paused?
11. Target size. Are buttons and links big enough to tap on a phone without hitting the neighbour?
12. Page language and titles. Is the page language set, and does each page have a unique, descriptive title?

Automated tools such as Lighthouse in Chrome DevTools or WAVE catch some of these, roughly the mechanical ones like missing alt attributes and low contrast. They cannot judge whether alt text is meaningful or whether a custom menu works with a screen reader. Use them as a first pass, not a verdict.

Where small business sites usually fail

From auditing sites, the recurring problems are the same handful:

• Low-contrast text chosen for looks
• Forms with placeholder text instead of labels
• Custom menus, sliders and pop-ups that cannot be operated by keyboard
• Cookie banners that trap focus or hide the page
• Headings used for styling rather than structure
• Images of text, such as a promotion baked into a banner image

Page builders and heavily animated themes make several of these more likely, which is one reason accessibility should be checked during the build. The website development process includes it in the testing stage for that reason.

Accessibility and conversions

The changes that make a site accessible usually make it easier for everyone: clearer labels, readable contrast, bigger tap targets, sensible headings. How website design affects conversions covers that overlap from the conversion side.

Should you publish an accessibility statement?

Private businesses are not required to, but a short statement saying what standard you aim for, any known issues, and how someone can contact you if they have trouble is a sensible, low-cost step. It also gives people a route to tell you about a problem before it becomes a complaint.

What to do next

1. Run the twelve checks above on your homepage, a service page and your contact form.
2. Fix the failures that block tasks first: keyboard access and form labels.
3. Fix contrast and headings next.
4. Make accessibility part of the brief for any redesign, so it is built in rather than added later.

Accessibility is one of the things that has to be built in from the start of any project, covered in the business website development guide. If you would like a site audited or built to WCAG 2.2 AA, see the website development service, or WordPress development for WordPress sites.