Making Your Website and Documents Accessible: A Guide for UK Businesses

According to the government’s Family Resources Survey, 16.7 million people in the UK, one in four, were disabled in 2024 to 2025. Some will be your clients, some your staff, some the people you send letters, forms and reports to. If your website or documents don’t work with a screen reader, a keyboard or a magnifier, you’re making it harder for them to deal with you.

The good news is that most of the fixes are simple, and many are built into tools you already use.

What UK law expects

The Equality Act 2010 requires service providers to make reasonable adjustments so disabled people aren’t put at a substantial disadvantage. The Equality and Human Rights Commission’s code of practice says this includes making websites accessible, for example to people who use text-to-speech software, people who can’t use a mouse, and people with dyslexia.

Two points matter for small businesses:

• The duty is anticipatory. You’re expected to think about barriers in advance, not wait until a disabled person complains.
• It applies to every service provider, not just large companies or the public sector. Northern Ireland has equivalent rules under the Disability Discrimination Act 1995.

Public sector bodies have stricter rules under separate regulations and must meet WCAG 2.2 level AA. Private businesses aren’t bound by those regulations, but WCAG 2.2 AA is the clearest benchmark for what “accessible” means in practice. The American ADA, which often appears in articles on this subject, doesn’t generally apply to UK businesses.

What WCAG 2.2 covers

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, version 2.2, were published by the W3C in October 2023. They’re built around four ideas: content should be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. The 2.2 update added criteria that matter for everyday business sites, including:

• Target size: buttons and links at least 24 by 24 pixels, or spaced out enough to tap accurately.
• Focus not obscured: when someone tabs through a page, the item they’re on must not be hidden behind a sticky banner or cookie notice.
• Accessible authentication: logging in shouldn’t depend on solving a puzzle or remembering and retyping a code without help, such as being able to paste it or use a password manager.
• Consistent help: contact details or help links in the same place on every page.
• Redundant entry: don’t make people type the same information twice in one process.

Your website: the checks that matter most

You don’t need to be a developer to spot most problems. Try these on your own site:

1. Use only the keyboard. Press Tab to move through the page. Can you reach every link, button and form field, see where you are, and submit the contact form?
2. Check contrast. WCAG requires a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text. Pale grey text on white usually fails.
3. Look at images. Every meaningful image needs alt text describing what it shows or does. Decorative images should have empty alt text so screen readers skip them.
4. Check headings. Pages should use real headings in order, not just bold text, so screen reader users can jump between sections.
5. Check links. “Click here” tells someone nothing out of context; “Download our price list” does.
6. Test forms. Every field needs a visible label, and error messages should say what’s wrong and how to fix it.
7. Zoom to 200%. Text should still be readable, with nothing cut off or overlapping.
8. Caption videos and provide transcripts for audio.

Add an accessibility statement saying what you’ve done, what you know still needs work, and how people can contact you if they have a problem. If someone else built or hosts your website, ask them which of these checks they’ve carried out.

Your documents: Word, PowerPoint, Excel and PDF

Most accessibility problems in documents come from formatting by eye rather than with the tools provided. The fixes:

• Use built-in heading styles (Heading 1, Heading 2) instead of making text bigger and bold. They create the structure screen readers use, and give you a navigation pane and table of contents for free.
• Add alt text to pictures, charts and diagrams. Right-click the image and choose View Alt Text.
• Use real tables for data, with a header row, and never use tables just to lay out a page.
• Write meaningful link text rather than pasting long web addresses.
• Don’t rely on colour alone to show meaning, such as red for overdue.
• Use a clear sans-serif font at a readable size, and avoid long passages in capitals or italics.
• Run the Accessibility Checker. In Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook, go to Review > Check Accessibility. It lists the problems it finds and explains how to fix each one.
• Save PDFs properly. Create PDFs from Word using Save As or Export rather than printing to PDF, so the headings and tags carry across. A scanned document is just a picture of text and is unreadable to a screen reader unless it’s been through text recognition.

The biggest win is your templates. Fix the letterhead, report and proposal templates once and every document your team creates from them starts off accessible.

Write so everyone can follow it

Plain English helps everyone, including people with cognitive disabilities, people reading in a second language and busy clients reading on a phone. Use short sentences, short paragraphs, descriptive headings and familiar words. Explain any technical or legal terms you can’t avoid.

Keep it going

Accessibility isn’t a one-off project. New pages, new documents and new templates can each bring problems back. Build the checks into how you work: run the Accessibility Checker before anything goes to a client, check new web pages with a keyboard before they go live, and review your templates once a year.

If you’d like outside Microsoft expertise on the tools and processes your team uses to produce documents, our IT consulting team can help. You might also find our post on UK privacy compliance in 2026 useful when reviewing your website.