Is Your Accountancy or Law Firm’s Website Accessible? A Plain-English WCAG 2.2 AA Guide for Professional Services

If you run an accountancy practice, a solicitors’ firm or a financial advice business in South East London or North Kent, your website is often the first professional judgement a prospective client makes about you. For services built on trust — wills, tax returns, conveyancing, pensions — a site that is hard to read, hard to navigate, or simply excludes some visitors sends the wrong signal before a single email is exchanged. Web accessibility, and specifically the WCAG 2.2 AA standard, is one of the more overlooked parts of that first impression.

What WCAG 2.2 AA Actually Asks For

WCAG (the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) is the internationally recognised standard for making websites usable by people with visual, hearing, motor or cognitive differences. Level AA is the standard referenced in UK public sector accessibility regulations and widely treated as good commercial practice. In plain terms, it asks that a website:

• Has enough colour contrast between text and background to be read comfortably, including by people with low vision or colour blindness
• Can be fully operated using a keyboard alone, not just a mouse or trackpad
• Gives every image a meaningful text alternative, so screen reader users know what it shows
• Labels every form field clearly, so a contact form or enquiry form can be completed without guesswork
• Allows text to be resized or zoomed without breaking the layout
• Provides captions or transcripts for any video or audio content

None of this requires a plain or unbranded design. It requires deliberate choices during design and build — the kind that a competent developer builds in from the start rather than bolting on afterwards.

Why This Matters More for Professional Services Than Most Sectors

Accountants, solicitors and financial advisers work in regulated, trust-dependent fields, and that changes the accessibility calculation in a few ways:

Your client base skews toward exactly the people accessibility protects

Wills and probate, retirement planning, and long-term financial advice disproportionately involve older clients, some of whom rely on screen magnification, higher contrast, or keyboard navigation because of age-related vision or dexterity changes. A site that is difficult for them to use is a site that quietly turns away the clients most likely to need your services.

Legal exposure is real, even without industry-specific rules

The Equality Act 2010 requires reasonable adjustments for disabled customers, and a website is increasingly treated as part of that duty of service, alongside your office and your phone line. You don’t need a sector-specific accessibility regulation to have a legal reason to get this right.

It is a visible proxy for how carefully you run your practice

Clients choosing an accountant or solicitor are already assessing attention to detail, because that is the service they are buying. A site with broken forms, illegible contrast, or a layout that falls apart when zoomed suggests the same lack of care might apply elsewhere — fairly or not.

A Five-Minute Self-Check You Can Do Today

You don’t need specialist tools to spot obvious problems. Try this on your own site:

1. Unplug your mouse and try to reach your contact form, your services pages and your main navigation using only the Tab and Enter keys. If you get stuck or lose track of where you are on the page, keyboard users will too.
2. Zoom your browser to 200% and check nothing overlaps, disappears, or becomes unreadable.
3. Look at your body text against its background. If it’s light grey on white, or a pale brand colour on white, it likely fails the AA contrast requirement.
4. Check whether your enquiry form fields have visible labels, not just placeholder text that disappears the moment you click into the box.
5. If you publish PDFs — fee guides, engagement letters, annual reviews — try opening one with a screen reader, or at minimum check it isn’t just a scanned image with no underlying text.

Free tools such as the WAVE accessibility evaluation tool or your browser’s built-in accessibility inspector can flag many of these issues automatically, and are a reasonable starting point before commissioning a full WCAG audit.

Common Accessibility Mistakes We See on Professional Services Sites

A few patterns turn up repeatedly on accountancy, legal and financial advice websites:

• PDF-only documents for fee schedules or client guides, with no accessible HTML alternative
• Low-contrast “corporate” colour schemes — pale blues and greys that look smart on a designer’s monitor but fail contrast checks in daylight
• Icon-only navigation or buttons with no text label for screen readers to announce
• Contact and enquiry forms with no error messages that a screen reader user can actually locate
• Video content — increasingly used for introducing partners or explaining services — published without captions

Most of these are inexpensive to fix once identified. The bigger cost usually comes from not knowing they exist in the first place.

Livicode Tech Solutions works with accountants, solicitors and financial advisers across Bexley, Dartford, Bromley, Greenwich and Lewisham. If you’re not sure whether your site would pass a keyboard-only test or a contrast check, tell us about it — no obligation, and no assumption that the fix has to mean a full rebuild.

Livicode Tech Solutions — Your Local Digital Solutions Partner
www.livicode.com · info@livicode.com · WhatsApp: +44 7708 803980