Accessibility guide for your website

No UK law sets a minimum font size for a business website. What the law does ask is that you don’t shut disabled customers out, and the internationally recognised standard for websites explains how to do that without naming a font size either. So the sizes on this page come from the companies that design the screens your customers use: Apple and Google.

What the law says

The Equality Act 2010 gives anyone who provides a service to the public a duty to make reasonable adjustments, so that disabled people are not put at a substantial disadvantage (section 20, applied to services by section 29). The Act doesn’t mention websites and doesn’t say what a reasonable adjustment looks like online. The detailed website rules, the 2018 accessibility regulations, cover public sector bodies only, and GOV.UK’s guidance on them notes that all UK service providers still have the Equality Act duty.

The yardstick most organisations use is WCAG 2.2, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines published by the W3C, the body that sets web standards. Level AA is the level most aim for. It is a sensible standard to build to, not a certificate, and meeting it is not a promise that nobody could ever complain.

What WCAG 2.2 asks for

WCAG sets no font size. Instead, it makes sure text still works for the people who need it bigger or clearer:

• Zoom: text can be made up to twice as big (200%) without anything being cut off or stopping working.
• No sideways scrolling: the page fits a screen 320 pixels wide without the reader having to slide it left and right.
• Contrast: normal text stands out from its background by a ratio of at least 4.5 to 1, and large text by 3 to 1. Buttons, form boxes and icons need 3 to 1.
• Tap targets: buttons and links are at least 24 by 24 pixels, or spaced far enough apart that a thumb can’t catch the wrong one. Links inside a sentence are an exception.
• Keyboard focus: someone moving through the page with the Tab key can see where they are.

The sizes Apple and Google design to

Apple and Google both publish the rules their own apps follow, and they are more generous than the WCAG minimums.

Apple. Its Human Interface Guidelines set the default text size on iPhone and iPad at 17 points, with 11 points as the smallest. They also say a button needs a hit area of at least 44 by 44 points.

Google. Material Design, the system behind Android, sets its default large body text at 16 and large button labels at 14 (in Android’s scalable units). Google’s Android accessibility help asks for touch targets of at least 48 by 48 dp, about 9mm across, with space between them.

The British Dyslexia Association. Its 2026 style guide says no single format works for everyone, so readers should be able to change text size and spacing for themselves. It recommends bold rather than italics or underlining for emphasis, avoiding long passages of capital letters, left-aligned text and plain backgrounds behind words.

What that means for your website

Putting those together, here is a sensible standard for any trade website:

• Main text at 16 pixels or larger, never small grey type for anything a customer needs to read.
• Menu items and button labels at 14 pixels or larger.
• Buttons at least 44 pixels tall, with your phone number one of them.
• Dark text on a plain, light background. No paragraphs over busy photos.
• No sentences in capitals or italics, and text that lines up on the left.
• A page that still works when zoomed, so a customer who needs bigger text can have it.

Try it on your own site in two minutes

• Read it at arm’s length. Open your home page on your phone, without zooming. Can you read the main text comfortably?
• Take it outside. In daylight, is any text pale grey, or white over a photo, and hard to make out?
• Tap with your thumb. Try the phone number, the menu and every button on the first screen. Do you hit the right one first time?
• Look for capitals and italics. Whole sentences in either are harder to read.
• Zoom to 200%. On a computer, press Ctrl and + (Cmd and + on a Mac) until the browser shows 200%. Does the text wrap neatly, or do you have to scroll sideways and find words cut off?
• Press Tab. Still on the computer, press Tab a few times. Can you see which link is selected?

Free tools such as Google’s PageSpeed Insights and WAVE will flag low contrast and missing labels too. They help, but the W3C is clear that “no tool alone can determine if a site meets accessibility standards”, so the checks above still matter. For the rest of a phone check, our five-minute mobile check covers tap-to-call, speed and the contact form.

How we build our websites

Our websites for trades are designed to meet WCAG 2.2 AA, with large readable text and big tap targets. We don’t call them certified or fully accessible: no single official UK certificate exists, and automated checks can’t prove a whole site passes. If you need a formal audit, independent specialists such as AbilityNet offer one, and we’re happy to work alongside them.