The website accessibility duty — without the panic
Parish and town councils are public-sector bodies, so their websites fall under the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) Accessibility Regulations 2018. In practice that means meeting WCAG 2.2 level AA and publishing an accessibility statement — and the duty is now referenced in Assertion 10 of the AGAR, which is why auditors have started asking.
What it actually requires
- Perceivable content — images have alt text; documents aren’t published as photographed scans; colour contrast is sufficient
- Operable by keyboard — everything reachable without a mouse; a “skip to content” link
- Understandable — pages declare their language; links say where they go (“Agenda for 14 May”, not “click here”)
- An accessibility statement — a page saying what standard the site meets, what doesn’t comply and why, and how to request content in another format
The five fixes that solve most parish council failures
- Stop uploading scanned image PDFs — publish minutes and agendas as real text
- Add alt text to images (or empty alt for decoration)
- Rename vague links — every “read more” becomes a description
- Declare the page language and use proper headings in order
- Publish the accessibility statement (GOV.UK provides a model)
Check where you stand in ten seconds
Our free indicative checker looks at your homepage for the most common failures. It’s not a full audit — WCAG has dozens of criteria that need human judgement — but if it finds failures, they’re real, and they’re usually the cheap ones to fix.
And if the underlying problem is that meeting documents get published wherever there’s space on an ageing website: ClearDays publishes them to a page built to meet the standard from the start.
General information, not legal advice. The regulations include limited exemptions (e.g. certain pre-2018 content) that need case-by-case judgement.