You are probably here because a tender document, a procurement questionnaire or a contract renewal asked a question you cannot yet answer. This page covers which law actually applies to you, what the buyer is really asking for, and what nobody can honestly tell you from a scan.
First, which one applies
Most guidance on this subject names one of them and implies it covers everybody. It does not, and the difference decides whether you are being asked for a legal minimum or for a commercial one.
Every UK business
Applies to any service provider in the UK, private or public. It requires reasonable adjustments so that a disabled person is not put at a substantial disadvantage. It does not mention WCAG anywhere, and it sets no technical standard, which is why nobody can hand you a certificate against it. WCAG 2.1 AA is treated as the working benchmark for meeting it in practice, but that is convention rather than statute.
Public sector bodies
Applies to central and local government and to some charities and NGOs delivering public services or receiving public funding. This one does name a standard: WCAG 2.2 Level AA, plus a published accessibility statement that is kept up to date. It sits on top of the Equality Act rather than replacing it.
Anyone selling into the EU
The compliance date was 28 June 2025, with 2030 as the final deadline for services already in use before then. If you sell to customers in the EU it reaches you regardless of being a UK company, and enforcement is being taken more seriously across member states through 2026.
Anyone bidding for work
In practice this is what actually forces the issue. WCAG 2.1 AA is already an explicit requirement in most UK public sector procurement frameworks, procurement staff are told to specify WCAG 2.2 AA in tender documents, and enterprise buyers increasingly ask for conformance documentation at vendor selection and at contract renewal. You can be fully within the law and still lose the contract for having no evidence.
What they are actually asking for
A written statement of which standard and level your site has been assessed against, which pages were assessed, on what date, and by whom. It is a claim you are making, not a badge somebody issues you, which is why it has to be defensible rather than optimistic.
What was tested, how it was tested, and what failed. A credible one names the success criteria that failed rather than counting errors, because a buyer's accessibility lead is checking whether you understood the criteria, not whether your number is low.
What is not yet conformant, what you are doing about it, and when. This is the part most people are surprised by: buyers rarely expect a perfect site. They expect you to know what is wrong and to have a dated plan, and a candid roadmap frequently beats a clean claim nobody believes.
A public page describing all of the above in plain language, including the known limitations. Mandatory for public sector bodies under the 2018 Regulations, and increasingly requested from their suppliers as well. We publish our own, limitations included.
There is no certifying body for WCAG. What exists is a conformance claim you make and are accountable for, and evidence of how it was tested. Automated tools detect only a minority of real barriers, because most success criteria need human judgement: whether alt text is meaningful, whether a journey can be completed by keyboard alone, whether an error message explains the error. Our own free check says the same thing on its own page, and a clean result from it is not conformance and must never be sent to a procurement team as though it were. If you meet a supplier who will certify your site this week, you have met somebody selling you a document that will not survive being read.
How it runs
Free, about a minute
Contrast, alt text, form labels and page language, run by machine. It clears the mechanical faults so nobody pays a human rate to find them. Run it yourself now without talking to us, and keep the result whatever you decide next.
Quoted after we look at the site
Keyboard-only journeys, screen reader behaviour, focus order, error handling and the criteria a machine cannot judge, across your distinct page templates rather than every page. You get the audit summary, the conformance claim written so it is defensible, the remediation roadmap with dates, and an accessibility statement you can publish. What it costs depends on how many templates and journeys there are, and you get a fixed price in writing first.
Optional
We can do the remediation or hand the roadmap to whoever maintains your site, and we will say plainly which is cheaper for you. If your developer can act on it, that is usually the better answer and we would rather tell you that than take the work.
We publish our own accessibility statement, known limitations included, and it says we review against WCAG as it evolves rather than claiming a one-off certification. It is the same document we would help you write, so you can read ours before deciding whether we should write yours.
