2026 Digital Accessibility Index: A UK Perspective

A scan of 475 UK websites shows where UK web accessibility falls short.

Gothic-style towers with intricate detailing and a British flag waving against a clear blue sky.

On this page

Every website in this report has been legally required to meet accessibility standards since the Equality Act 2010(opens in a new tab) took effect. More than a decade later, most still fall short. Now, the European Accessibility Act(opens in a new tab) adds a second standard for UK organisations selling certain products and services into the EU.

At the same time, how people reach a website has changed. Ofcom found that 54% of UK adults now use AI tools like ChatGPT, Copilot, and Gemini(opens in a new tab), up from 31% a year earlier, and three in four online adults now read AI-generated search summaries. A shopper asking an AI tool to find a product lands on that product page. A patient asking about a flu vaccine appointment lands on the booking page. Neither reaches the homepage first.

That's the gap AudioEye's 2026 Digital Accessibility Index set out to measure. Here's what stood out on UK websites:

Interior pages have slightly more issues per page than homepages, but because there are far more of them, they account for nearly all of a site’s total issues.
Five accessibility issues are responsible for nearly 40% of everything we detected.
Healthcare homepages average 112.3 issues per page, nearly double the overall average.

01. The Whole Site Is Now the Front Door

For years, most accessibility programs could rely on a predictable path: a user landed on the homepage, then moved through the site in a roughly linear way. Organisations that focused on the homepage and a handful of key pages were covering the route most users actually took.

That assumption no longer holds. Interior pages are where most activity happens: making purchases, booking appointments, submitting claims. They also have about 15% more elements per page than homepages: images, links, buttons, input fields. That's part of why interior pages average 65.7 issues per page, against 62.7 on homepages.

Bar chart comparing retail homepage and interior page issues, with interior pages having 11% more issues.

Three more issues per page might sound like a modest gap, but multiply it across hundreds of interior pages and it adds up to the overwhelming majority of a site's total accessibility issues. Most accessibility programs are still focused on the homepage, but the whole site is now the front door.

02. The Five Issues Almost Every UK Page Fails

A national retailer's checkout page and a local council's bin collection schedule have little in common. Yet across our scan, the same five accessibility issues appeared again and again, regardless of industry or company size.

Issue	User Impact	Page Fail Rate
Links that don't warn users before leaving the site	Screen reader users lose track of where they've ended up	91.1%
Vague link text	Screen reader users have to click a link just to find out where it leads	71.1%
Low-contrast interactive elements	People with low vision can't make out buttons or form fields well enough to use them	70.6%
Missing skip navigation links	Keyboard users have to tab through the whole menu just to reach the page's actual content	61.3%
Heading structure out of order	Without a clear heading order, screen reader users lose the map they rely on to get around the page	61.0%

Page fail rate: the percentage of scanned pages on which this issue appeared at least once.

Each of these fails on at least six in ten pages we scanned, with one issue appearing on nine out of ten pages scanned. Combined, they account for nearly 40% of issues detected.

These are not difficult problems to solve. Writing a clear link, choosing a compliant colour, adding a skip link, ordering a heading correctly: none of it demands specialist skill. Catch them during design and development, and they cost almost nothing to resolve. Miss them, and you're fixing the same five mistakes across hundreds of pages.

03. Healthcare Is the Homepage Exception, and It’s Significant

Across most industries we measured, interior pages have more issues than the homepage. Healthcare breaks that pattern, and by a wide margin: homepages there averaged 112.3 issues per page, 70% more than the 65.9 found on interior pages.

That doesn't contradict the pattern the rest of this report establishes. Interior pages are still where most of the activity happens, and healthcare's interior pages are right in line with the all-industry average. The exception is entirely on the homepage.

Bar chart showing average issues per page by industry on UK sites. Healthcare has the highest issues on the homepage, while others have balanced levels.

One likely explanation: healthcare is an industry where people tend to reach a website more directly. Most people already have a GP, a local pharmacy, or a specific trust in mind, so they go straight to that organisation's homepage rather than reaching a specific page through a general search or an AI summary. That makes the homepage critical for pathfinding: the page patients rely on to navigate to the appointment, the prescription, or the service they actually came for.

That's exactly where healthcare falls down. Unlabelled navigation menus failed to identify themselves to assistive technology on 98.0% of healthcare pages, versus 44.3% across all industries, so a patient using a screen reader often can't tell where a menu item leads at all. Search and filter fields lacked proper labels on 98.3% of pages, versus 62.4% overall, cutting off the other main way to find a specific service. Both failures break the same job: getting a patient from the homepage to the page they actually need.

For most industries, accessibility degrades the deeper you go into the site. In healthcare, it's the front door itself that's broken.

04. Three Laws Already Apply, and Enforcement Is Tightening

Three legal frameworks currently apply to UK organisations, and enforcement is tightening across all three. For the full breakdown of what UK organisations are legally required to do, see our guide to UK website accessibility law. Here's the short version.

The Equality Act 2010(opens in a new tab) treats a website as a service. Organisations serving UK customers have a legal duty to make "reasonable adjustments" so people with disabilities aren't shut out. In practice, WCAG 2.2 Level AA has become the benchmark that regulators, courts, and accessibility professionals use to judge whether that duty has been met. The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) enforces this in England, Scotland, and Wales, with powers to investigate organisations and pursue court action. The RNIB and other advocacy groups have pursued and settled website accessibility claims directly with organisations for years, typically without a public court ruling or naming the companies involved.
The Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations(opens in a new tab) (PSBAR) go further for public-sector organisations, including government departments, local councils, NHS bodies, and publicly funded universities. PSBAR requires WCAG 2.2 Level AA conformance and a published, regularly updated accessibility statement. The Government Digital Service audits a sample of public-sector sites every year, and can publicly name organisations that stay non-compliant.
The European Accessibility Act (EAA) adds another layer for UK organisations selling defined categories of products and services into the EU. Enforcement began on 28 June 2025, and it didn't stay quiet for long: the first lawsuits under the Act were filed in France by that November. It doesn't replace UK law, but it means an organisation serving both markets is now navigating two overlapping standards, and the newer one is already being tested in court.

There's a commercial case for closing this gap, too. UK households that include a disabled person represent an estimated £446 billion in annual spending power, based on research by the University of Bristol. Every page that fails a screen reader, a keyboard user, or someone who needs higher contrast is a page that can't capture any of it, and increasingly, those are the exact pages AI search sends shoppers and patients to first.

These laws all come down to the same question: can a person with disabilities actually use the website? Based on what we found, on the pages users and AI search are now landing on first, the answer is overwhelmingly no. That's the risk. For the organisations that move first, it's also the opportunity.

The Union Jack flag flies in front of an ornate building with columns.

Where to Start Fixing This

UK websites still have real work to do. This data reflects a pattern across seven industries and 14,424 UK pages: the pages doing the most work, the ones people actually use to book an appointment, buy a product, or find a service, are frequently the ones with the most accessibility issues. Here's where to start.

Start by finding out which pages are actually driving your traffic. Check your analytics or AI citation data for what's getting the most visits, especially from AI search, and run those through AudioEye's free accessibility scanner. Your homepage is still worth checking, but for most sites, the pages pulling your traffic carry more risk than the homepage does (unless you're in healthcare, where the homepage is the riskiest page on the site).
Fix the five issues that show up almost everywhere first. Links that don't warn users before leaving the site, vague link text, low-contrast interactive elements, missing skip links, and heading structure together accounted for close to 40% of issues detected.
Treat this as ongoing, and pair automated scanning with expert review. Sites change constantly: new pages, new components, new content. A clean scan today doesn't guarantee a clean site next quarter. Automated tools catch a lot, but the complex interactions that showed up most in this data (menus, comboboxes, scheduling tools) often need expert review to catch what automation alone misses.

Real protection comes from combining automated coverage across every page with expert review of the interactions that matter most.

Methodology

This analysis is based on a scan of 475 UK websites, covering 14,424 pages (362 homepages and 14,062 interior pages) across seven industry segments: Retail & Consumer Services, Healthcare & Sciences, Public & Non-Profit, Legal & Financial Services, Tech & Digital Services, Industrial & Manufacturing, and Professional Services. Some homepages couldn't be successfully scanned, which is why the homepage sample (362) is smaller than the total number of sites analysed (475). Figures reflect average issues per page and element failure rates, broken out by homepage vs. interior page and by component/issue type.