The regulations are six years old and parish councils have been fully in scope since September 2020, but most clerks have never read them and most council websites don’t meet them. Neither fact is surprising: the regulations are written for government departments, and the enforcement so far has been polite. Here is what they actually ask, in the order a clerk needs to know it.
What the regulations require
Two things. First, the website must meet the accessibility requirement, which the government’s guidance now states as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.2 at level AA (it was 2.1 until the standard was updated in 2024), and that is the version the Government Digital Service, which monitors compliance, tests against. Second, the council must publish an accessibility statement that follows the government’s model: what the site does and doesn’t do, what isn’t accessible and why, how to ask for an alternative format, how to complain, and when the site was last tested.
What’s exempt
- Documents (PDFs, Word files) published before 23 September 2018, unless someone needs them to use a service the council provides. Twenty years of old minutes are exempt. The minutes from last month are not.
- Recorded video and audio published before 23 September 2020, and live video.
- Maps, as long as the essential information is also available in an accessible form, such as the address.
- Content on the site that the council doesn’t control, such as a hall booking system run by someone else, although the statement should say so.
There is also a “disproportionate burden” exemption: a council can decide that fixing a particular thing would cost more than the benefit justifies. It has to assess that properly and say so in the statement, and it can’t be used for the basics. A parish council arguing that making its agendas readable is a disproportionate burden would not get far.
The one thing that fails most council sites
Meeting papers. The agenda and the minutes are written in Word, saved as a PDF and uploaded. A PDF saved that way has no tags, so a screen reader hears a stream of words with no headings, no list structure and no way through a table of payments. On a phone it’s a page you pinch and drag. A study by Recite Me in July 2026, shared by the SLCC, found that 98% of pages across the 25 largest councils failed automated WCAG 2.2 checks, and meeting papers were the commonest reason.
The fix is not to write minutes differently. It’s to publish them as a web page, with the PDF alongside for anyone who wants to print. A page has headings, lists and tables that a screen reader can navigate and a phone can reflow. Some website systems do this from the Word document directly; with others, the clerk pastes the text into a page. Either way, the thing that most often fails becomes the thing that most reliably passes.
The rest of the list
Beyond the papers, the things GDS’s monitoring finds most often on small council sites:
- Text that doesn’t have enough contrast against its background, especially grey on white and text over the village photo.
- Links that say “click here” or “minutes” twelve times on one page, so a screen reader user can’t tell them apart.
- Images with no text alternative, including the crest and the photo of the chair.
- Pages that can’t be used with a keyboard alone, usually because of a menu or a carousel the supplier added.
- Pages that break at 400% zoom, which is what the regulations expect and what many residents use.
- A statement copied from another council, with that council’s name still in it.
The accessibility statement
The government publishes a model statement and the regulations say what it must contain. Use the model. Fill in what’s true: which parts of the site don’t meet the standard, what you’re doing about them and by when, how someone asks for a document in another format, how long you take to reply, and that complaints can go to the Equality Advisory and Support Service. Date it, say when the site was last tested and by whom, and review it at least once a year. A statement that claims full compliance when the minutes are untagged PDFs is worse than no statement, because it’s a published untruth.
Enforcement, honestly
GDS monitors a sample of public sector websites each year and writes to those that fail, asking for a plan. The Equality and Human Rights Commission can enforce, and the Equality Act gives a resident who can’t use the site a claim of their own. No parish council has been fined. What happens in practice is a complaint from a resident, a letter, and a clerk spending a weekend that could have been avoided. The sensible position is that the regulations describe what a council website should be anyway: readable by everyone the council serves, including the ones who use a screen reader, a phone, or large text. Treat them as a description of a good website rather than a threat and most of the work is already done.