If you’re on a parish or town council, your website isn’t just expected to look decent – it’s legally required to be accessible. This isn’t a grey area or a nice-to-have. It’s a specific set of rules, and councils are one of the groups they apply to directly.
Here’s what the law actually says, what it means in practice, and how we build every council website to meet it from day one.
The legislation
The relevant law is the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018. It requires public sector websites, including parish and town councils, to meet the international accessibility standard WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) at level AA, and to publish an accessibility statement confirming it.
Two things are worth knowing about this that catch people out:
- The standard isn’t fixed. WCAG gets updated periodically, and the required version updates with it (with a grace period to catch up). The current standard is WCAG 2.2 AA. If your provider built your site against an older version and never revisited it, there’s a good chance it’s already out of date.
- The accessibility statement isn’t optional paperwork. It has to genuinely reflect your site’s current state, including known issues and a plan to fix them. A statement that’s broken, missing, or simply copied from a template elsewhere is itself a compliance gap.
What accessibility actually means in practice
None of this requires turning your website into something dry or clinical. In plain terms, an accessible council website means:
- Text is readable – good colour contrast, sensible font sizes, and content that doesn’t rely on colour alone to convey meaning.
- Everything works without a mouse – residents using a keyboard or a screen reader can navigate the whole site, including menus and forms.
- Images make sense to someone who can’t see them – meaningful alt text, not just filenames or nothing at all.
- Documents are accessible too – PDFs of agendas, minutes, and policies need to be readable by assistive technology, not just scanned images of paper.
- Nothing moves or plays automatically in a way that’s disorientating or hard to stop.
- Headings and structure make sense, so the page reads logically whether you’re scanning it visually or listening to it read aloud.
What happens if a council doesn't comply
Accessibility isn’t self-policing. The Government Digital Service runs a monitoring programme that reviews public sector websites, including parish and town councils, and will write to a council directly if issues are found, with a deadline to fix them. Residents can also raise a complaint with the Equality and Human Rights Commission if they can’t access information they’re entitled to. In practice, most issues get resolved through correspondence rather than formal action but it’s a real, active process, not a theoretical risk.
How we build for it
We treat accessibility as a baseline requirement for every council website we build, not an optional extra bolted on at the end. In practice that means:
- Checking colour contrast and typography choices against WCAG 2.2 AA at the design stage, before a single page is built.
- Structuring navigation and headings properly, so the site makes sense to a screen reader as well as a mouse.
- Testing with a keyboard and screen reader, not just running an automated scanner and calling it done.
- Reviewing uploaded documents for accessibility as part of the content migration, rather than leaving legacy PDFs to quietly stay non-compliant.
- Providing a genuinely accurate accessibility statement as part of the build, not a generic template.
- Keeping this maintained afterwards through our Care Plan – accessibility isn’t a one-off certificate, it’s something that needs revisiting as your site changes and as the standard itself is updated.
Get in touch
If you’re not sure whether your current website meets the current standard or you know it doesn’t and haven’t got round to dealing with it, we’re happy to take a look and tell you plainly where you stand.
Get in touch for a free, no-obligation review of your council’s website.
