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Performance and standards

Website accessibility

Testing a site against WCAG 2.2 AA and fixing what fails, rather than handing over a report.
Website shown: SmartX Tutoring

What it is

The Equality Act 2010 requires reasonable adjustments for disabled people, and that duty covers services delivered through a website. WCAG 2.2 Level AA is the standard used to demonstrate it.

Automated tools catch roughly a third of the problems. The rest needs somebody with a keyboard and a screen reader, and that is where most of the work is.

We fix what we find. A PDF of failures with nobody to act on it helps no one.

Who it is for

  • Organisations selling into the public sector, where it gets asked in procurement.
  • Businesses that have had a complaint or a solicitor's letter.
  • Sites with a form, a booking flow or a checkout, where a failure costs a customer rather than only compliance.
  • Anyone who installed an accessibility overlay and has been told it is not enough.

What is included

  • Automated scan across every distinct template
  • A keyboard-only run through the main journeys, no mouse
  • Screen reader checks on forms, menus and anything interactive
  • Colour contrast checked against real text rather than swatches
  • Findings mapped to specific WCAG 2.2 AA success criteria
  • Failures fixed, then the same tests run again

What is not

  • Certification. There is no legal accessibility certificate in the UK, and anybody selling one is selling a badge.
  • Overlay widgets. They sit on top of the page and cannot repair the markup underneath.
  • Legal advice. We can tell you what fails; a solicitor tells you what that means for you.
  • Testing with disabled users. It is worth doing, and a specialist commissions it properly.

How it runs

4 steps, in this order.

  1. 01

    Scan

    Automated, across every template. It finds the straightforward third — missing labels, poor contrast, images with no text alternative.

  2. 02

    Keyboard

    Every journey again with no mouse at all. This is where menus, modals and forms fail, and where an automated tool sees nothing wrong.

  3. 03

    Fix

    Ordered by who it blocks. A checkout nobody can complete with a keyboard comes a long way before a decorative image with no alt text.

  4. 04

    Retest

    The same tests again, plus a written accessibility statement you can publish if you want one.

Price

Quoted after a first scan, because the manual work scales with the number of distinct templates rather than the number of pages.

Questions people actually ask

Is accessibility a legal requirement for my business?

The Equality Act 2010 requires reasonable adjustments, and that has been read as covering websites for years. Public sector bodies have specific regulations on top. There is no single dated deadline for private UK businesses, whatever a cold email tells you.

Will an overlay widget do the job?

No. It runs on top of the page and cannot change the underlying markup. Several have been named in claims rather than protecting anybody from them.

Which level should I aim for?

AA. It is what the regulations reference and what essentially every audit is written against. AAA is not expected, and parts of it are not achievable on a commercial site.

Will fixing it change how the site looks?

Contrast fixes can shift some colours slightly. Nearly everything else is markup and keyboard behaviour, which is invisible to most visitors.

Do the sites you build already pass?

We build to AA and test the templates. No site is permanently accessible, though — new content can break it, which is why the check is worth repeating.