Accessibility isn't optional: the legal position in 2025
The European Accessibility Act comes into force this month. The Equality Act already applies. If your website isn't accessible, you're exposed - legally and commercially.
On 28 June 2025, the European Accessibility Act (EAA) comes into force across the EU. If you sell products or services to EU customers, which, for many UK businesses, you do, this affects you directly. But even setting the EAA aside, the legal position in the UK has been clear for years: the Equality Act 2010 requires that services, including websites, be accessible to people with disabilities. The law isn't new. What's new is that enforcement is starting to catch up.
What the law actually requires
The Equality Act doesn't specify WCAG compliance levels or mandate particular technical standards. What it requires is that disabled people aren't placed at a substantial disadvantage when accessing your services. In practice, courts and regulators look to WCAG 2.2 Level AA as the benchmark for what "accessible" means on the web. If your site meets WCAG 2.2 AA, you're in a strong position. If it doesn't, you're relying on the argument that your particular failures don't constitute a substantial disadvantage, which is not an argument you want to be making in front of a judge.
The EAA is more prescriptive. It explicitly requires that e-commerce websites, banking services, and certain other digital services conform to the EN 301 549 standard, which maps closely to WCAG 2.2 AA. Non-compliance can result in fines determined by each EU member state.
What most sites get wrong
In my experience, the most common accessibility failures aren't exotic edge cases, they're fundamental issues. Missing alt text on images. Insufficient colour contrast. Forms without proper labels. Interactive elements that can't be reached with a keyboard. Navigation that doesn't make sense to a screen reader. These aren't difficult to fix, but they require someone to actually check for them, which is the step that gets skipped most often.
I audit every site I build against WCAG 2.2 AA before launch, using a combination of automated tools (axe-core, Lighthouse) and manual testing with screen readers and keyboard navigation. Automated tools catch about 30% of accessibility issues. The other 70% require human judgement, can you actually complete this form using only a keyboard? Does the reading order make sense? Is the error message associated with the correct input?
The commercial case
Legal compliance aside, roughly 20% of the UK population has a disability of some kind. That's one in five potential customers who may struggle to use your website if it isn't accessible. For e-commerce sites, inaccessible checkout flows are literally turning away revenue. I've seen conversion improvements of 10-15% on sites where I fixed accessibility issues in the purchase flow, because the fixes, clearer labels, better error messages, more logical tab order, also help everyone, not just users with disabilities.
What to do now
If you haven't had an accessibility audit done on your site, get one. If you had one done more than two years ago, get another, standards and your site have both likely changed. If you're planning a new build or a redesign, make accessibility a requirement from day one rather than a checkbox at the end. Retrofitting accessibility is always more expensive than building it in.
I offer standalone accessibility audits as well as building accessibility into every project we deliver. If you'd like to understand where your site stands, get in touch and I'll take a look.
Chris Ryan
Managing Director
17+ years in full-stack web development, most of it leading teams agency-side across e-commerce, CMS platforms, and bespoke applications. Specialises in infrastructure, system integration, and data privacy, with hands-on experience as a Data Protection Officer. Founded Innatus Digital in 2020 to offer the kind of honest, technically-led partnership that he felt was missing from the agency world.