The Everypage study · September 2026

How accessible are UK small-business websites? Not very.

We tested 54 UK business websites — 255 pages, not just homepages — against the standard the Equality Act points to. The median site scores 65 out of 100. 69% have at least one problem serious enough to stop someone completing a task.

Check your own site free How we did it

The headline numbers

65/100median accessibility score across the sample. 100 means our tests found nothing.

69%of sites had at least one critical problem — the kind that blocks a blind or keyboard-only visitor outright.

30%scored under 50 — "urgent" in our reports. Only 9% had nothing at all to fix.

67median number of individual problem instances per site, from a median of 4 distinct defects — the same mistake repeated across pages.

Where the sample landed

Good (90–100)11 sites · 20%

Fair (70–89)10 sites · 19%

Poor (50–69)17 sites · 31%

Urgent (under 50)16 sites · 30%

61% of sites scored under 70. That is not a story about careless businesses: most of these problems come from themes and templates, and the same defect repeats on every page. It is fixed once, in one place — if someone finds it.

The eight most common problems

Share of sites with at least one instance.

Rule	In plain English	Sites
color-contrast	text too faint to read against its background	80%
link-name	links with no readable name	52%
image-alt	images with no text description	43%
target-size	tap targets too small to hit reliably	35%
meta-viewport	pinch-zoom disabled	22%
link-in-text-block	links told apart from text by colour alone	20%
label	form fields with no label	20%
list	lists built wrongly	17%

The top three — faint text, unnamed links, images without descriptions — are each an afternoon's work for a developer, because they live in the template. They are also exactly what a claimant's expert looks for first.

Method, so you can check it

Sample: 80 .co.uk domains drawn at random (seed 42) from the public Tranco top-million list, ranks 100,000–1,000,000 — the band where real small and mid-sized businesses live, below the household names. 26 were unreachable or blocked automated visitors and are excluded; 54 were tested.

Each site: up to six pages reached by following its own links, loaded in real Chromium, tested with axe-core 4.10 against WCAG 2.0, 2.1 and 2.2 Level A and AA. Best-practice rules outside the standard were excluded. Scores use the same formula as our paid reports. Automated testing finds roughly a third of the standard's criteria, so every figure here is a floor, not a ceiling.

We publish aggregates only. No site is named, and we have not contacted any of them about these results uninvited. Want your own numbers? One page, free.