If you run a school website, accessibility is not a nice-to-have or a job for “when we get around to it”. Since 2018, it has been a legal duty. Under the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations, maintained schools, academies and trusts are all required to make their websites usable by people with disabilities, including parents who use screen readers, rely on keyboard navigation, or struggle with low colour contrast.
The good news? Getting compliant is far more manageable than most headteachers fear. Here is what the law actually asks of you, and the practical steps that make the biggest difference.
The standard you are being measured against
The regulations point to a technical benchmark called WCAG 2.2 at level AA. That sounds intimidating, but in plain terms it is a checklist covering four ideas: your content should be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. In practice that means a parent should be able to read your text, navigate every page with a keyboard, understand your links and forms, and have it all work reliably on whatever device or assistive technology they use.
You do not need to memorise the checklist. You do need to know that “we think it looks fine” is not the same as meeting the standard, and that the responsibility sits with the school, not just the web designer.
The accessibility statement you probably need
Every public sector website must publish an accessibility statement. This is a specific page, usually linked in the footer, that explains how accessible your site is, lists any known problems, and tells visitors how to report an issue or request information in another format.
It is one of the first things an auditor or a complaint will check for, and it is one of the easiest things to get wrong by leaving it out entirely. If your site does not have one, that is the first gap to close.
Quick wins that make a real difference
A handful of small habits cover most everyday accessibility issues:
- Add alt text to every meaningful image. A parent using a screen reader hears the alt text instead of seeing the picture. Describe what it shows in plain English, and leave purely decorative images blank so they are skipped.
- Check your colour contrast. Pale grey text on a white background, or white text over a light photo, is hard to read for anyone and fails the standard. Aim for strong, obvious contrast between text and its background.
- Use real headings. Headings should be marked up as headings, not just bold text. This lets assistive technology jump between sections, and it helps your search ranking too.
- Write descriptive links. “Download the term dates” tells a visitor far more than “click here”, especially when they are tabbing through links out of context.
The document trap
Schools publish a lot of PDFs: policies, newsletters, admissions forms, SEND information. This is where accessibility quietly breaks down. A scanned PDF is often just an image of text, which means a screen reader cannot read a single word of it, and neither can Google.
Wherever you can, put the information on an ordinary web page instead of hiding it in a PDF. Where a document genuinely has to be a PDF, make sure it is created from real text rather than a scan, and given a clear, descriptive title. Your statutory information, in particular, is much safer as accessible web content.
Video and captions
Video is a wonderful way to show off school life, but a clip with no captions shuts out any parent who is deaf or hard of hearing, and anyone watching with the sound off in a busy house. Add captions to your videos, and give a short text summary nearby so the content is available to everyone.
Where to start
You do not have to fix everything overnight. Publish an accessibility statement, run through the quick wins above, and rescue your most important information out of inaccessible PDFs. That alone puts you ahead of most school websites and, more importantly, means every parent in your community can actually use the site you have worked so hard on.
If you would rather not tackle it alone, this is exactly the kind of thing we handle every day. We build accessibility into every school website we design, so compliance is not something you have to think about. Take a look at our school website design service, or get in touch for a friendly, no-pressure chat about where your current site stands.
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