Over the last decade, almost everything acquired a digital front door: GP appointments, parking, benefits, banking, event tickets, even the council tip. When those front doors are built badly, disabled people are locked out of ordinary life as effectively as by any staircase — and far more invisibly.
The barriers are well understood. Screen reader users hit unlabelled buttons that announce as, literally, “button”. Keyboard users hit menus that only work with a mouse. Deaf users hit videos with no captions. People with low vision hit grey-on-white text; people with dyslexia or a learning disability hit walls of jargon; people with photosensitive epilepsy hit autoplaying animation. CAPTCHAs defeat all of the above at once.
The law online, in two halves
Public sector: specific and enforceable
The Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) Accessibility Regulations 2018 require councils, NHS bodies, government services and most other public bodies to make their websites and apps accessible — in practice, to meet the WCAG accessibility standard at level AA (the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, currently version 2.2) — and to publish an accessibility statement saying what does not comply and how to get content another way.
Government monitors compliance and can name and shame. If a public body’s site fails you, the accessibility statement must include a contact route, and using it creates a record they are audited on.
Everyone else: the Equality Act
Shops, banks, ticket sellers and every other service provider are covered by the Equality Act 2010, which applies to services however they are delivered — a website is no different from a shop floor. The duty to make reasonable adjustments is anticipatory: businesses are supposed to have thought about disabled customers before you arrive, not after you complain.
An inaccessible booking system that means disabled customers pay a phone premium, or simply cannot buy at all, is exactly the kind of substantial disadvantage the Act was written for. Very few cases are ever brought, which is why so little changes — but the law is there, and letters citing it get replies that feedback forms never do.
A step at the door excludes you in front of witnesses. A broken checkout excludes you alone in your kitchen, and the shop never even knows it happened.
What to do when a site locks you out
- Capture it. Screenshot or screen-record the failure, note the page, the date, your browser and the assistive tech you were using. Thirty seconds of video beats three paragraphs of description.
- Tell them, in writing, what failed and what you were trying to do: “I could not complete checkout using a keyboard; I use a screen reader; this is a reasonable adjustments issue under the Equality Act 2010.” Ask for another way to complete the task at no extra cost in the meantime.
- For public bodies, use the accessibility statement route, and escalate persistent failures to the Equality and Human Rights Commission via its public sector reporting arrangements.
- Get advice from the Equality Advisory & Support Service (0808 800 0082) if you want to take it further — county court claims for services discrimination have a six-month less one day time limit.
- Tell the organisation’s competitors’ customers too — reviews mentioning accessibility change corporate behaviour faster than lawyers do.
If you run a website (including a small one)
Most inaccessibility is not malice; it is defaults. The basics cost almost nothing when done from the start:
- real text, not text baked into images; proper headings in order
- alt text on images that carries the meaning, not the filename
- labels on every form field and button
- colour contrast that passes WCAG AA — and never colour as the only signal
- everything reachable and usable by keyboard alone
- captions on video; transcripts for audio
- no autoplay, no flashing, and a way to pause anything that moves
This site is built to those principles, and our accessibility statement says so publicly — if we fall short, tell us and we will fix it. That sentence is the entire culture change we are asking every organisation for.