Two accessibility stories are doing the rounds this year. One is a new EU regulation that agencies are using to scare small UK businesses into buying something. The other is a duty that's applied to your website since 2010, that almost nobody's ever mentioned to you. Only one of those is actually urgent, and it isn't the one getting the headlines.
Worth saying up front: this is a working summary, not legal advice. If a compliance decision has real money behind it, run it past someone qualified before you rely on it.
The European Accessibility Act, and who it actually catches
The European Accessibility Act became applicable on 28 June 2025. It requires certain digital products and services to meet EN 301 549, which is built on WCAG Level AA. The bit that gets left out of the sales pitch: it applies on a market-access basis. If EU-based consumers can complete a transaction on your website, you're in scope, wherever your business is based. If they can't, you're not.
For most Zenlio Local clients, that's the end of the story. A Hampshire electrician, a personal trainer in Fleet, a Basingstoke plumber: none of them are selling to EU consumers through their website, so the EAA doesn't touch them. A hospitality business taking bookings from EU visitors, or a Studio client with an EU-facing e-commerce arm, is a different conversation.
Second, the old bit nobody mentionsThe Equality Act has been the real rule since 2010
Here's the part that actually matters to almost every UK small business with a website. The Equality Act 2010 requires service providers to make reasonable adjustments so disabled people aren't put at a substantial disadvantage. That duty already covers your website, has done for sixteen years, and carries no exemption for being small. WCAG Level AA is the practical benchmark used to judge whether your adjustments are reasonable.
The law didn't arrive in 2026. It's been sitting there since 2010. Nobody enforced it, so nobody worried about it. That's starting to change.
Enforcement in this country runs through civil claims rather than a regulator handing out fines, so it's been quiet for a long time. But EU enforcement of the newer, narrower EAA is already picking up: France saw its first lawsuits in November 2025, the Netherlands' regulator is actively pursuing e-commerce sites, and a German retailer was fined €150,000 over failures in its checkout flow alone. As accessibility gets more attention generally, the older UK duty gets more attention with it.
What actually failsThe same handful of things, every time
Text on colour that doesn't pass contrast
Pale grey body copy on white, or white text over a busy photo, looks clean and fails for a lot of people before you even get to a screen reader.
Images with no alt text
Every meaningful image needs a description a screen reader can announce. "IMG_4021.jpg" isn't one.
Forms without labels
A placeholder isn't a label. If a field's name disappears the moment someone starts typing, assistive tech never knew it was there.
Nothing works without a mouse
Try tabbing through your own site. If the menu, the booking widget or the enquiry form can't be reached by keyboard alone, that's a hard fail, not an edge case.
Video with no captions
Increasingly common on trade and hospitality sites now video's cheap to shoot. Deaf and hard-of-hearing visitors get nothing from it without captions.
Accessibility overlay widgets, the scripts that promise instant compliance with one line of code, generally don't fix any of this. They bolt a layer onto a broken page rather than fixing the page, and several have themselves been the subject of legal challenges for not delivering what they claim. Fixing the markup properly is cheaper long-term and it's the only version that actually works.
A half-day job, not a redesign
Run a free automated scan
WAVE or axe DevTools will surface the obvious failures, contrast, missing labels, missing alt text, in minutes.
Fix the top offenders first
Contrast and alt text are usually the biggest count and the fastest fix. Start there before anything structural.
Tab through your own site
No mouse, start to finish, including the enquiry form. Anywhere you get stuck, a real visitor gets stuck too.
Don't buy an overlay widget as the fix
See above. It's a sticking plaster sold as a cure.
This isn't a new checklist Zenlio invented for the occasion. Every Local build already targets a Lighthouse accessibility score above 95 as a standard part of the build, the same way it targets fast load times and clean schema. Good HTML and reasonable colour contrast get you most of the way there before accessibility is even the topic of conversation.
If you're working through the wider list of things a small business site needs to get right, this sits next to the cookie consent rules that changed this year and the more general list of what a tradesperson's website actually needs.
Most small business websites have been non-compliant since 2010. Nobody enforced it, so nobody worried about it. Worth fixing before that stops being true.
None of the fixes above are difficult on their own. The businesses that get caught out are the ones that never checked, not the ones that found a problem and left it. If you're not sure which pile your site falls into, run the scan first.
