Today we had a guest talk from David Fairbrother about accessibility, A talk I have previously been to during Belfast UX week, But regardless I stayed and took some notes of things I may of missed
2010 UK Equality Act - protects against discrimination, harassment, and victimisation based on nine "protected characteristics": age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership (in employment), pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation.
The Public sector bodies accessibility regulations 2018 are UK laws that require public sector organisations to make their websites and mobile apps accessible to people with disabilities. These regulations mandate that public sector bodies ensure their digital content is perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust, and they require an accessibility statement to be published on websites.
European Accessibility Act is a law that requires certain products and services in the European Union to be accessible to people with disabilities, effective from June 28, 2025. It harmonizes accessibility standards across the EU for various goods and services, including websites, mobile apps, banking, e-commerce, and transport, and applies to organizations that offer these to consumers in the EU. Non-compliance can result in significant penalties, such as fines or removal of products from the market
1 in 5 People are disabled in the UK
Only about 3% of websites are considered fully accessible.
In a scan of nearly 40,000 enterprise sites and ~2 million pages: every page had at least one accessibility error; the average page had 37 unique WCAG failures.
In a survey of the top 1 million websites, 95.9% had detectable failures to meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
On average, popular homepages had ~50.8 detectable errors (e.g., missing alt text, low contrast text, missing form labels).
Accessibility failures across components: menus (98% fail), images (52% fail), pop-ups (89% fail), forms (71% fail), buttons (83% fail).
In the UK: People with disabilities are 50% more likely to experience digital access barriers (than non-disabled).
In the UK public sector: Monitoring found that many websites/apps still don’t fully comply with the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018, covering 2022-24.
David showed a helpful site that helped to show how many people are affected by a disability https://how-many.herokuapp.com/people/200000
Screen Recording 2025-11-06 at 10.37.19.mov
He also showed us a Microsoft website that taught more about inclusive design and how to adapt to that, Showing us permanent, temporary and situational disabilities.