Why Accessibility Matters for Small Businesses
An accessible website is one that people can use whatever their abilities, whether they're blind and using a screen reader, can't use a mouse, have low vision, are colour blind, or simply find cluttered pages hard to follow. For a small business, that's a commercial point before it's a legal one: if someone can't read your prices, fill in your contact form or get through your checkout, they'll go somewhere else, and you'll never know why. Many accessibility fixes, like clear headings, readable text and properly labelled forms, also make a site easier for everyone to use and easier for search engines to understand. Please note this article is general guidance rather than legal advice.
The UK Position: The Equality Act 2010
In Great Britain, the Equality Act 2010 makes it unlawful for service providers to discriminate against disabled people, and that includes services provided online. Businesses have a duty to make reasonable adjustments so that disabled people aren't put at a substantial disadvantage, and for service providers that duty is anticipatory: you're expected to think ahead about what disabled customers are likely to need, not wait until someone complains. The Act doesn't name a specific technical standard for private-sector websites, and what's 'reasonable' depends on things like the size and resources of the business. But WCAG, the international web accessibility guidelines, is the widely recognised benchmark for what an accessible website looks like, so it's the sensible standard to work towards. Northern Ireland has its own, separate disability discrimination legislation.
The European Accessibility Act: Does It Apply to You?
The European Accessibility Act (Directive (EU) 2019/882) has applied since 28 June 2025. It sets accessibility requirements for a list of products and services sold to consumers in the EU, and one of those services is e-commerce: selling goods or services to consumers online. The UK isn't covered by it as UK law, but it applies based on where your customers are, not where you're based, so a UK business selling online to consumers in EU countries can fall within scope. There's an important exemption: microenterprises providing services, defined as businesses with fewer than 10 employees and an annual turnover or balance sheet total of no more than €2 million, are exempt from the requirements for those services. That exemption doesn't extend to the covered products themselves, and it falls away if you grow beyond those limits. Each EU country enforces the Act through its own national law, so if you sell into the EU and you're near or above those thresholds, it's worth taking proper advice.
WCAG 2.2: The Standard to Aim For
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are published by the W3C. WCAG 2.2 became a W3C Recommendation in October 2023, and the W3C recommends using it as your target. It's organised around four principles: content should be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. Success criteria come in three levels, A, AA and AAA, and Level AA is the level most laws and policies point to. WCAG 2.2 builds on 2.1, so a site that meets 2.2 also meets 2.1. Its new criteria include making sure keyboard focus isn't hidden behind sticky headers or cookie banners, a minimum size for buttons and links people tap, alternatives to drag-and-drop, not forcing people to re-enter information they've already given, and login steps that don't rely on memory puzzles. The harmonised EU standard used for the EAA, EN 301 549, is currently based on WCAG 2.1 Level AA, so working to WCAG 2.2 AA puts you on the right side of both.
The Most Common Problems We See
On small business sites, the same handful of issues come up again and again. Images with no alt text, or alt text that just says 'image'. Light grey text on a white background that fails contrast checks. Contact and quote forms where the labels are just placeholder text that disappears when you start typing, or error messages that only turn a box red. Menus, sliders and pop-ups that can't be used with a keyboard, or where you can't see which item is focused. Headings chosen for their look rather than their structure. Links that just say 'click here' or 'read more'. And cookie banners or chat widgets that trap keyboard users or cover the content behind them. None of these need a redesign to fix; most are a few hours of careful work.
How to Check Your Own Site
Start with what you can do yourself in half an hour. Put your mouse away and try to use your homepage, main menu and contact form with just the Tab, Enter and arrow keys: can you reach everything, and can you always see where you are? Zoom your browser to 200% and check nothing overlaps or disappears. Run a few key pages through a free automated checker such as the WAVE tool or the accessibility audit in Chrome's Lighthouse. Automated tools are a good first pass, but they can only catch some issues, so they won't tell you whether your alt text is useful or your checkout makes sense to a screen reader user. For anything business-critical, like a booking flow or a shop checkout, a manual review is worth doing properly.
Making It Part of How the Site Is Built
Accessibility is much cheaper to build in than to bolt on. If you're planning a new site or a redesign, make WCAG 2.2 AA part of the brief, and choose themes, plugins and Shopify apps with accessibility in mind, because a lot of problems come from third-party components. Be wary of accessibility overlay widgets that promise one-line-of-code compliance; they don't fix the underlying issues in your site's code. Consider publishing a short accessibility statement that explains what you've done, any known issues and how people can contact you if they have trouble. And treat it as ongoing: every new page, image and form is a chance to get it right or wrong.
Where to Start
If you sell to consumers in the EU and you're not a microenterprise, check where you stand under the EAA now. Whatever your size, the Equality Act already expects you to think about disabled customers, and the fixes that matter most are usually straightforward. If you'd like to know how your site measures up, our free website audit includes a look at the most common accessibility issues, and we can help put a practical plan together from there.