Website accessibility is a Consumer Duty requirement

What we found

We ran UXDuty, our Consumer Duty scanning tool, across 12 financial services firms: three banks, three investment platforms, three mortgage brokers, three insurers. All 12 had accessibility failures.

Accessibility made up nearly half of everything we flagged — 261 of 581 findings. Break those down by who they affect, and one group dominates.

1. Screen reader users (83% of findings) — Landmark, heading and labelling issues, plus missing alt text and misused ARIA, all scramble what a screen reader announces. That breaks the page for people who are blind, and for anyone who relies on audio because of a learning or cognitive disability.

2. Keyboard-only users (9% of findings) — Hidden content, focus order that jumps around the page and nested controls all break normal keyboard navigation. That hits anyone who can't use a mouse: people with motor impairments, people navigating by voice control, and anyone with RSI or a temporary hand injury.

3. Low vision and colour blind users (5% of findings) — Text that misses minimum colour contrast is hard to read if you're colour blind, have low vision, or there's glare on your screen.

4. Touch-screen users (3% of findings) — Targets too small to hit reliably, worst on mobile. Hard for anyone with limited dexterity, and for any of us tapping while travelling.
   

What this looks like in practice

Here are some of the findings, and what they mean for the person on the other end:

• One bank's buttons had no name a screen reader could announce. The customer hears "button" and nothing else, then has to decide whether to press it.

• At an investment platform, the primary brand colour failed contrast — so every button on the site failed with it. A customer with low vision can see there's a button but they can't read what it does.

• A mortgage broker's application page had its headings out of order, so the heading that starts the application was set as a minor one. Screen reader users jump between headings to find where to begin — this page sends them straight past it.

• An insurer's complaints page had no main heading at all, so nothing told the customer where they'd landed. And this is someone trying to complain, so something has already gone wrong for them.

Why this matters

The UK government's own Family Resources Survey puts 16.7 million people in the UK as disabled — one in four of us, up from 12.9 million a decade ago. The Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) counts more than 2 million living with sight loss serious enough to affect daily life, and expects that to double by 2050.

Accessibility failures don't only hit disabled users, either. Fix the accessibility failures and the whole journey gets better — you're not building a separate service for a minority, you're fixing a service that's harder to use than it needs to be.

We're not alone in finding this

WebAIM's 2026 report on the top million homepages detected WCAG failures on 95.9% of them, up from 94.8% the year before. The average page carried 56.1 errors, 10% more than last year. Six failure types — low contrast text, missing alt text, missing form labels, empty links, empty buttons and missing page language — account for 96% of everything found, and that list has barely changed in seven years.

Financial services has an obligation

The FCA's Financial Lives survey found 49% of UK adults — 26.4 million people showing at least one characteristic of vulnerability. Consumer Duty asks firms to support those customers, and to be able to show they've checked.

Every one of our 261 accessibility findings sat inside the Consumer Support or Consumer Understanding outcomes. Each one is a vulnerable customer who can't navigate your website, or can't understand what they're buying. That's a firm failing the customers it claims to serve.