Website Accessibility and WCAG Compliance

Why accessibility is worth getting right

Around one in five people in the UK has a disability, and a lot of them are quietly shut out by sites that weren't built with them in mind — a checkout you can't finish with a keyboard, text that vanishes against its background, buttons a screen reader announces as nothing at all. Those are lost customers you never hear from. There's a legal side too: the Equality Act 2010 makes it unlawful to discriminate against disabled people, and public sector bodies have their own accessibility regulations to meet. More and more private contracts and tenders now ask for WCAG conformance in writing before they'll sign.

Whoooop Ltd has worked in full-stack development for over 15 years, and we build accessibility into our own work from the start rather than treating it as an afterthought — sensible heading structure, proper labels, colour contrast that actually passes, and pages you can drive with a keyboard alone. The same approach works on a site you already have.

The barriers we look for

Accessibility isn't one switch you flip. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.2, at the AA level most organisations aim for) cover a long list of things, but in practice the same handful of issues come up again and again.

How we go about it

We start with an audit of the pages that matter — your home page, a few key journeys, the contact or checkout flow — rather than a single throwaway score for the whole site. Automated tools catch some of it, but a lot of accessibility can only be judged by hand: actually tabbing through the page, listening to it with a screen reader, and checking the awkward edge cases a scanner skips. You get a plain-English list of what's wrong, where, and why it matters, sorted so the things blocking real people come first.

Then we fix it. Some of it is quick — a missing label here, a contrast tweak there. Some of it runs deeper and needs a bit of rebuilding around a stubborn component. We work through the list in priority order and retest as we go, because the only way to know a fix holds is to try the page the way an affected visitor would. If you'd rather we built accessibility in from the ground up on a new project, that's covered on our web development page.

Where a rebuild makes more sense

Now and then the honest answer is that the site is fighting you. If it's built on something that resists being made accessible — a page builder that spits out tangled markup, say, or a theme layered with years of plugins — patching each issue can cost more than starting clean. We'll tell you when that's the case. Our website redesign and rebuild page explains how a rebuild works, including keeping the search rankings you've already earned.

Keeping it accessible after launch

Accessibility slips. A new blog post with no alt text, a fresh banner in a colour that doesn't pass, a third-party widget that ignores the keyboard — any of these can quietly undo good work. If you'd sooner not police it yourself, our website maintenance and support page covers ongoing checks that catch this kind of drift before it adds up.