Services · Compliance & standards
A UK Accessibility Review Covers the Equality Act and PSBAR
For the UK organization that wants a straight answer on its accessibility footing, whether that is PSBAR's public sector regime or the Equality Act's duty to customers.
What We Keep Finding
UK web accessibility runs on two laws that work quite differently. Public sector bodies answer to PSBAR, the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018, which brings Level AA, a published accessibility statement, and a government monitor that genuinely checks. Everybody else answers to the Equality Act 2010, whose duty is to make reasonable adjustments so disabled customers are not shut out. The Equality Act names no technical standard at all, and in practice WCAG has become the benchmark both sides of a dispute reach for.
For a public body there is a wrinkle worth having straight, because almost nobody states both halves. Your legal duty is met by presumed conformity with the European harmonised standard, which carries WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Since October 2024 the government's own monitoring has tested against WCAG 2.2 Level AA. So the duty sits at 2.1 and the thing that actually gets measured sits at 2.2, which is why we audit all 55 rules of 2.2. That covers the monitor's bar and the duty underneath it in one pass.
It is also worth knowing what the monitor keeps finding, because it tells you where to look first. Across more than 1,200 UK public sector websites, the four commonest problems were insufficient color contrast, missing visible focus, keyboard operation that fails, and content that will not reflow. Three of those four are not reliably found by any automated tool, which is the government's own monitoring making the case for a human pass better than we could. The same monitoring found most bodies had published a statement and many were out of date, unreviewed for over a year, which is a smaller job to fix and a quicker win.
What We Check
- Audit all 55 WCAG 2.2 A and AA rules, the bar the UK monitor works from
- Review your accessibility statement block by block against what PSBAR expects
- Run the journeys an Equality Act question turns on, so find, apply, buy, contact
- Test with a real blind screen-reader user on NVDA, which leads in Europe, or on JAWS if you prefer
- Separate what is a public sector duty from what is an Equality Act one
What You Get
Every service on this site runs the same three-pass engine: an automated scan, an expert review of all 55 WCAG 2.2 A and AA rules, and a hands-on session with a professional blind screen-reader user. You get one report with every finding screenshotted, ranked by user impact, and linked to its fix. Your team fixes, we verify: the re-audit is half price within 3 months.
The format is not a mystery either. Read the sample report before you spend anything.
The Honest Limit
One honest limit and one thing an audit can never be. We are auditors rather than solicitors, so what counts as a reasonable adjustment for your organization is advice we leave to the people licensed to give it, and the report is written to make that conversation short. The thing an audit can never be is a conformance claim for your whole website, which is exactly what a PSBAR accessibility statement invites you to write. Conformance in the standard is defined for a web page, and a sample of pages cannot carry a claim for a site. So the honest statement names what was tested, on what date, with what result, and says plainly where the gaps are. Monitors respond better to that than to a claim they can disprove in an afternoon.
What It Costs
Rapid Audit: $499, up to 10 pages you pick, report in 5 business days. Standard Audit: $1,499, up to 25 pages in 10 business days. Flat rates, no discovery calls, and a real blind screen-reader user on every engagement. Pick your pages. We bring the humans.
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Guides, checklists, tools, and terms that go with this service.