Everything You Need to Know About the Equality Act 2010

The Equality Act 2010 is the United Kingdom's main anti-discrimination law. In force since October 2010, it replaced earlier rules such as the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 and protects people against discrimination because of nine protected characteristics, including disability. It applies to employers, service providers and public bodies, and it places a duty on them to make reasonable adjustments so that people with disabilities are not put at a substantial disadvantage.

Yes. Part 3 of the Act covers the provision of services to the public, and a website or online service is a service. The Equality and Human Rights Commission's code of practice and its website accessibility guidance make clear that online barriers can amount to discrimination. The duty to make reasonable adjustments is anticipatory: barriers should be removed before a visitor runs into them, not after a complaint.

Reasonable adjustments are changes that remove or reduce a disadvantage for disabled users. In practice that means text alternatives for meaningful images, full keyboard operation, captions for video, sufficient color contrast, resizable text, clear headings and labels, consistent navigation, described input errors, a defined page language and compatibility with screen readers. What counts as reasonable is proportionate to the organisation, which is why an accepted technical yardstick is used rather than a fixed list.

The Equality Act does not name WCAG in the text of the law. Courts and the Equality and Human Rights Commission treat WCAG as the accepted technical benchmark, and WCAG Level AA is the level commonly referenced when assessing whether a site gives fair and usable access. Public sector bodies go further: the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018 require WCAG 2.1 Level AA and a published accessibility statement. For everyone else, Level AA is the practical standard to build to.

The Equality Act 2010 is UK law, the ADA is a U.S. civil rights law and the EAA is an EU directive. Each comes from a different legal system, but all three are assessed against the same technical standard: WCAG. If you serve customers in the UK, the U.S. and the EU, one WCAG Level AA programme plus market-specific documentation covers all three instead of three separate projects.

Start with an automated scan and add manual testing on top. allyWay crawls your website and flags the automatically detectable WCAG issues behind Equality Act requirements — missing alt text, low contrast, unlabeled form fields, broken heading structure and more — and returns a prioritized report. Criteria that need human judgment, such as keyboard navigation, come with step-by-step instructions. Your first scan is free.

allyWay covers the whole workflow in one tool: an AI-powered scan against WCAG 2.2, automatic fixes for supported issues, an accessibility widget that gives visitors usable controls right away, and continuous monitoring that alerts you when new barriers appear. One place to find issues, automate what can be automated and get guided instructions for the rest — starting with a 7-day free trial.

A user who is excluded by a barrier can raise a complaint and bring a discrimination claim in the county court, where compensation is not capped, and the Equality and Human Rights Commission can investigate and support cases. Beyond the legal exposure, an inaccessible site turns away customers and damages the brand. A traditional expert audit runs to thousands of pounds per review; allyWay starts with a free scan and a 7-day trial, then covers continuous scanning, automatic fixes and monitoring in a predictable monthly plan.