One in five people in the UK lives with a disability. If your website is hard to use with a screen reader, hard to read at low contrast, or impossible to navigate without a mouse, you are turning away a large and often overlooked group of customers before they even reach your services page.
Direct answer: a small business website becomes meaningfully more accessible by fixing five things: adding alt text to images, making sure every page works with keyboard navigation alone, using strong colour contrast, writing clear link text, and structuring headings properly. These five changes cover most of the WCAG 2.2 AA standard and can be done without a developer.
This guide explains what the law actually requires, then gives you a checklist you can work through today.
Is website accessibility a legal requirement in the UK?
Yes, for public sector websites specifically, under the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018. For private small businesses, the picture is broader but still real. The Equality Act 2010 requires businesses providing goods and services to make reasonable adjustments for disabled customers, and this has been interpreted to include websites. If your business also serves customers in the EU, the European Accessibility Act, in force since June 2025, adds further obligations.
In practice, this means accessibility is not purely a legal tick-box exercise for most small businesses. It is closer to the same reasonable-adjustments principle that already applies to a physical shop, applied to your website instead.
Why it matters beyond compliance
The UK’s disabled community represents significant spending power that is easy to lose through an inaccessible site. Beyond the commercial case, accessible design tends to overlap heavily with good design generally: clear headings, readable text, and logical navigation help every visitor, not just those using assistive technology.
The checklist: what to fix first
1. Add alt text to every meaningful image
Alt text is the written description a screen reader announces instead of an image. Without it, a visually impaired visitor using a screen reader hears nothing where your product photo, team photo, or diagram should be.
How to fix it: in WordPress, every image upload has an “Alt Text” field. Describe what the image shows and why it matters, in plain language. A product photo needs alt text like “blue ceramic mug with wooden handle,” not “IMG_2841” or nothing at all. Purely decorative images, like a background pattern, can have empty alt text so screen readers skip over them.
2. Check your site works with keyboard navigation alone
Some visitors cannot use a mouse and rely entirely on a keyboard to move through a page using the Tab key.
How to test it: unplug your mouse, or simply avoid using it, and try to reach your contact form using only the Tab and Enter keys. If you get stuck, cannot see which element is currently selected, or cannot open your navigation menu, that’s a real barrier for keyboard-only visitors.
3. Use strong colour contrast
Light grey text on a white background might look elegant, but it is genuinely unreadable for many visitors, including anyone with low vision or colour blindness.
How to fix it: free tools such as the WebAIM Contrast Checker let you paste in your text and background colours and get a pass or fail result against the WCAG standard. As a rough rule, if you’re unsure whether your text contrast is strong enough, it probably isn’t.
4. Write link text that makes sense on its own
A page full of “click here” links is a genuine barrier, because screen reader users often navigate by jumping between links in a list, out of context. “Click here” tells them nothing.
How to fix it: replace “click here” with a description of the destination, such as “read our website maintenance checklist” instead of “click here to read more.”
5. Structure your headings properly
Headings are not just a visual size choice. Screen reader users often navigate a page by jumping between headings, similar to using a table of contents. If your page skips from an H1 straight to an H4, or uses headings purely for large bold text rather than genuine structure, that navigation breaks.
How to fix it: use H2s for main sections and H3s for subsections, in order, without skipping levels purely for visual styling.
A simple self-audit table
| Check | Pass? |
|---|---|
| Every meaningful image has descriptive alt text | |
| The whole site is usable with keyboard navigation alone | |
| Text and background colours pass a contrast check | |
| No “click here” or “read more” links without context | |
| Headings follow a logical order (H1, then H2s, then H3s) | |
| Forms have visible labels, not just placeholder text | |
| Video content has captions or a transcript |
Five or more passes is a solid starting position. Fewer than that suggests it’s worth working through this checklist properly before doing anything else on the site.
Do I need a formal accessibility statement?
It is increasingly considered good practice, even for small businesses, and is already required for public sector sites. An accessibility statement is a short page explaining what you’ve done, what you’re still working on, and how a visitor can report a problem. It does not need to be complicated: a few honest sentences are far better than nothing at all, and honesty about known gaps is itself part of demonstrating good faith effort.
What accessibility fixes also do for your SEO
Search engines cannot see images either, so alt text helps Google understand your page in exactly the way it helps a screen reader user. Clear heading structure helps search engines understand your page hierarchy too. In practice, most accessibility fixes and most SEO fundamentals point in the same direction.
When to bring in professional help
The checklist above covers the fixes with the biggest impact for the least technical effort. If your site is more complex, such as an online store with multi-step checkout, or you want formal WCAG 2.2 AA certification, a professional accessibility audit is worth the investment. Before commissioning one, it’s worth putting your requirements in writing using our guide on what to include in a website design brief, so you get an accurate quote rather than a vague one.
FAQs
Is website accessibility a legal requirement for UK small businesses? Public sector websites are legally required to meet accessibility standards. Private businesses fall under the Equality Act 2010’s reasonable adjustments principle, which is increasingly interpreted to include websites, particularly for larger or EU-facing businesses.
What is WCAG? WCAG stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, the internationally recognised standard for website accessibility. Most UK guidance currently references WCAG 2.2 at the AA level, which is a commonly used baseline for reasonable accessibility.
How much does it cost to make a website accessible? The core checklist above, alt text, keyboard navigation, contrast, link text, and headings, costs nothing beyond your own time. A formal professional audit for a more complex site typically runs from a few hundred to a few thousand pounds depending on scope.
Do small businesses need an accessibility statement? It is not universally mandatory for private small businesses, but it is considered good practice and demonstrates a genuine, documented effort, which matters if accessibility is ever formally challenged.
