Does my website have to be accessible, and can AI build one that is?

For a business: the Equality Act 2010 applies to anyone providing a service to the public, paid or not, and includes a duty to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people. It names no website and no technical standard, but a website is part of how most businesses serve the public now.

For a public body: the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018 add two specific duties. GOV.UK sums them up as meeting the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, WCAG 2.2, at level AA, and publishing an accessibility statement that explains how accessible the site is.

For both: neither law cares who or what built the site. A site drafted by an AI tool, a volunteer or an agency carries the same duty once you publish it, so the question is not whether to use AI, but who tests what it made.

Section 29 of the Act says a service provider must not discriminate against someone who needs its service, and that the duty to make reasonable adjustments applies to service providers. Section 20 sets out what that duty means: taking reasonable steps to avoid a disabled person being put at a substantial disadvantage, and where it concerns information, those steps include providing it in an accessible format.

Two details matter for a website. Schedule 2 says that for services the duty is owed to disabled people generally, not only to one particular customer. And section 20 says you cannot charge a disabled person for the cost of the adjustment.

What is reasonable depends on the business, and the Act sets no checklist. The practical yardstick is the one the public sector uses, WCAG 2.2 at level AA. A small business that builds to it, and offers another way to get the same information to anyone who still has trouble, is in a far stronger position than one that never looked.

The regulations cover public sector bodies. Regulation 3 defines them as the state, regional or local authorities, and “bodies governed by public law”: bodies set up to meet needs in the general interest, not commercial, which are mostly financed by public authorities, supervised by them, or run by a board more than half appointed by them. If your status is unclear, check it against regulation 3 with your clerk or legal adviser rather than assuming you are out.

Regulation 4 takes some out. Non-governmental organisations such as charities are exempt unless their services are essential to the public or meant for disabled people. Schools and nurseries are exempt except for their essential online administrative functions, such as a form for school meal choices, and GOV.UK says a partly exempt body still needs an accessibility statement. GOV.UK is also clear that the Equality Act duty applies to every service provider either way.

Regulation 8 says what the statement must contain: which parts of the site are not accessible and why, any accessible alternatives, a contact form for reporting a problem or asking for excluded content, and a link to the enforcement procedure. It must be in an accessible format, on the body’s website, and kept under regular review. GOV.UK publishes a sample statement to work from. The Government Digital Service checks a sample of public sector sites each year, and in Wales the Equality and Human Rights Commission enforces the accessibility requirement.

State the standard in the request: the site must meet WCAG 2.2 at level AA. Then test it, because a request is not a result. GOV.UK lists the common failures as sites that are hard to use on a phone or with a keyboard, PDF forms a screen reader cannot read, and poor colour contrast. An AI tool can produce every one of them.

Watch the documents. For a public body, regulation 4 exempts office files published before 23 September 2018 unless they are needed to use a service; anything published now is in scope. For anyone, a menu, price list or booking form as a PDF is often the part that fails. Publish them as web pages where you can, and if an AI tool produced a PDF, check it reads aloud in order with its headings and form fields labelled.

An AI tool can turn a test report into a clear accessibility statement in minutes. It cannot write an honest one without the report. GOV.UK says that if the government decides a public body’s statement is incorrect, it will publish the body’s name and a copy of its decision; and it says lack of time or knowledge cannot count when a body argues a fix would be a “disproportionate burden”.

Welsh language standards apply only to bodies named in regulations approved by the Senedd and then given a compliance notice by the Welsh Language Commissioner. The Commissioner’s list includes county councils, national parks and the Welsh Ministers, police and fire services, universities and colleges, and health boards. Town and community councils are not on it, and neither are private businesses. But no standards does not mean no duty: the Welsh Language Act 1993 requires public organisations that deliver public services in Wales to prepare a Welsh language scheme, and the Commissioner says they have a statutory duty to meet its commitments. Check for a scheme as well as a compliance notice; whichever you have says what your website must do.

For a body that has standards, the Commissioner’s regulatory policy statement on AI sets out what it expects. Test any AI system in Welsh before using it with the public. Do not publish AI translation without human review. A chatbot that serves English only, or that starts in Welsh and then says it does not support the language, is the Commissioner’s own example of provision that falls short.

For everyone else, the same advice is sound practice, and our guide on building a Welsh-language website with AI covers who can check the Welsh. One limit worth knowing: Helo Blod, the free Welsh Government service, cannot check material that must be published in Welsh to comply with the standards or a statutory Welsh language scheme.

Whether you are commissioning a site or building one for a client, the useful deliverable is not only the site. It is the evidence that it works for disabled people, in a form someone can keep up to date after the build.

Ask your designer, or tell your client, which standard the site is built to, how it was tested, and which tools, AI included, produced which parts. Then make sure the following exist, and agree who looks at them again after each change.