Website Accessibility Audits

Where UK organisations stand legally

Public sector bodies are covered by specific accessibility regulations requiring WCAG 2.2 AA and a published accessibility statement. Private businesses are covered by the Equality Act 2010, which requires reasonable adjustments for disabled people — and courts have accepted that websites fall within that.

We are not giving legal advice and would recommend your own if you are concerned. What we can say is that the risk is real, claims do happen, and the remediation is almost always cheaper than the dispute.

Automated tools find a fraction of it

Every accessibility scanner will tell you about missing alt text and insufficient contrast. Those matter, and they represent perhaps a third of what actually blocks people.

What automation cannot judge: whether alt text is meaningful or just present, whether the focus order makes sense, whether a custom component announces itself correctly to a screen reader, whether an error message is actually reachable, or whether the site is operable without a mouse at all.

Those need manual testing with real assistive technology, which is what our audits do.

What we test

• Keyboard operation end to end, including every form and modal
• Screen reader testing with NVDA and VoiceOver on the key journeys
• Focus visibility and a logical focus order
• Colour contrast, including text over images
• Form labelling, error identification and recovery
• Heading structure and landmark regions
• Motion, animation and reduced-motion preferences
• Zoom to 200% and reflow at 320px

What you get

A prioritised report ordered by how badly each issue blocks someone, not by severity label. An unlabelled checkout field that stops a purchase outranks a contrast issue in the footer, and a report that treats them equally is not usable.

Each finding includes the WCAG criterion, where it occurs, who it affects and how to fix it — written for a developer to act on. Where you need an accessibility statement, we draft one that reflects the site's real state rather than claiming compliance you do not have.

Accessibility statements

Public sector bodies must publish one. Private businesses are not required to, and doing so anyway is usually worth it — it demonstrates the reasonable adjustments the Equality Act expects, and it gives people a route to tell you what is not working.

It has to be honest. A statement claiming full WCAG 2.2 AA compliance on a site that does not meet it is worse than none, because it is now a documented claim. Ours describe the current state, the known issues, what is being done and who to contact.

Building it in rather than retrofitting

Remediating an existing site costs several times what building accessibly costs in the first place, because the fixes touch templates, components and sometimes the design itself.

If you have a rebuild coming, that is the moment. Accessibility requirements in the brief, a component library tested as it is built, and checks at each milestone rather than an audit at the end. The cost difference is large enough that it is worth delaying a remediation project to fold it into a planned rebuild.

Who this affects, concretely

It is easy to treat accessibility as abstract. In practice, on a typical UK site: someone with low vision using 200% zoom finds your navigation overlaps the content; someone with a motor impairment using keyboard only cannot reach your booking form because a modal traps focus; someone colour blind cannot tell which form field errored because the only signal was red text.

None of those people are edge cases, and all three are ordinary customers who went elsewhere without telling you why.

The overlap with SEO

Not the reason to do it, but worth knowing. Proper heading structure, descriptive link text, labelled form controls, meaningful alt text and semantic markup are all accessibility requirements and all things search engines use to understand a page — which is why this overlaps so heavily with on-page SEO and with the speed work in the same pillar.

Overlay widgets that promise instant compliance are the exception. They do not fix the underlying markup, disability advocacy groups broadly oppose them, and they have featured in claims rather than preventing them. We do not recommend them.