Does your small business website have to be accessible by law?

A question I hear from owners goes like this: “Someone told me my website has to be accessible by law now. Is that true for a business as small as mine?” The honest answer is that it depends on where you sell and what you sell, and that the law is only part of the story.

I’m a designer, not a lawyer, so treat this as orientation and check your own country’s rules. Here is what I can point to in the official sources.

What the European law says

The one that triggered most of the questions is the European Accessibility Act. The European Commission’s page on the Act explains that it has applied since 28 June 2025, and the text itself is Directive 2019/882. It covers certain products and services sold to consumers, and websites count when they are part of a covered service, for example online shopping.

The part that matters for you: the Directive exempts microenterprises that provide services. The Council of the EU describes a microenterprise as a business with fewer than 10 employees and an annual turnover below €2 million (Council summary). The Your Europe guidance for businesses says the same.

So a small plumber, consultant or salon in the EU that offers services is probably outside it. A small business that sells goods online is a different case, and member states apply the rules in their own way. If you sell to consumers in the EU, read the official summary for your sector.

What about the US, Canada, UK and Australia?

Each has its own rules and its own history of complaints, and I won’t pretend to summarise them from memory. If you are unsure, ask a local adviser, and ask them a concrete question: “Does my kind of business, with my kind of customers, have a duty here?” General advice about “the law” is not much use.

Why I would do it anyway

Even if you are exempt, the basics help your enquiries, because most of them are just good design.

• Contrast. Pale grey text on white looks elegant on your monitor and disappears on a phone in daylight. Readable text is a conversion issue before it is a legal one.
• Buttons that look like buttons. Clear labels such as “Get a quote” work better than “Submit”, for everyone.
• Forms with real labels. A field that only shows its label as grey placeholder text loses the label once someone starts typing. Visible labels fix that.
• Keyboard use. Press Tab on your site. You should see where you are, and you should be able to reach the menu and the contact form without a mouse.
• Descriptive links and image text. “Click here” tells a screen reader user nothing. A short description of a meaningful image does.
• Text size and spacing. If people must pinch and zoom to read, some of them simply leave.

The shared standard behind most of this is WCAG 2.2. You don’t need to read it. You need whoever builds your site to know it.

A quick check you can do today

1. Open your homepage on your phone, outside, and try to read it.
2. Tab through the page with your keyboard and note where you get lost.
3. Try to fill in your own contact form without using the mouse.
4. Zoom the browser to 200% and see whether anything breaks.

If something fails, you have found a real reason visitors might not enquire, which makes it worth fixing regardless of any regulation.

Be careful with overlay promises

You will see tools that claim to make a site compliant by adding a widget. I would not rely on a script to repair a site that was built without these things in mind. The reliable fix is in the design and the code, and it costs far less when it is done at the start.

If you want to know where your own site stands, this is part of what I look at in a UX and conversion audit, and I can build it in from day one on a new site through custom websites. You can also just get in touch. If you are comparing builders, my post on building your site with AI covers what to decide before the first prompt.