The one-line version
If your website serves EU customers it is now covered by a law with real fines, and even if it does not, UK law already expects your site to work for disabled visitors. Waiting for a complaint is the expensive strategy.
The European Accessibility Act came into force in June 2025 and applies to a wide range of digital services offered to consumers in the EU, wherever the business itself is based. Enforcement started politely and has stopped being polite: regulators in France, Sweden and the Netherlands are actively pursuing cases, the first lawsuits have been filed, and fines across member states range from five thousand to five hundred thousand euros depending on the country. A UK business selling to EU customers is in scope for those services. Brexit did not change that, any more than it stopped GDPR applying to UK firms with EU customers.
At home, the Equality Act 2010 has required service providers to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people since before most current websites were built. The Act does not name a technical standard, but courts and regulators treat the WCAG guidelines as the benchmark for what reasonable looks like, and public sector sites are already held to WCAG 2.2 AA by regulation. The direction of travel is one-way, and roughly one in five UK visitors has a disability that affects how they use the web, so the commercial case does not need the legal one.
What to actually do
First, find out where you stand, because most site owners have never tested. A proper audit scores the site against WCAG 2.2 AA and tells you which failures matter most, and which are quietly costing you customers right now. Second, fix in priority order, since most sites fail on a manageable list of recurring issues rather than needing a rebuild. Third, publish an honest accessibility statement that says what works, what does not yet, and how to reach you if something fails. That is what we build to as standard, and it is what we audit against for sites we did not build.