UK Disability History Month – why web accessibility matters

As we approach the end of 2025’s UK Disability History Month, it's worth reflecting on the history of digital accessibility, the efforts that can be made to make websites more accessible to everyone, and the improvements that we are making at the College.

Disability is a topic we care deeply about. People with disabilities are more likely to face mental health challenges, which is one of the reasons it’s important to ensure our content is clear and easy to use. You’ll see this in the mental health resources we share, our Delivering for Disability campaign, and our ongoing work to make this website as accessible as possible.

Disability, accessibility and the web

Disability can affect how people experience our website and digital content in many different ways. Here are just a few examples:

• Motor difficulties can make it hard to click on small links or navigate complex menus.
• Colour blindness and other visual impairments can make certain colour combinations or low-contrast text difficult to read.
• Hard of hearing and deaf users need captions or transcripts to fully access video and audio content.

But accessibility isn’t only about these examples – it’s about making sure everyone, regardless of ability, can perceive, understand, navigate and interact with the web. This includes people with cognitive differences, speech impairments, and those using assistive technologies like screen readers or voice input.

Web accessibility through the ages

For over a quarter of a century, people have been defining guidelines for making online content more accessible – but progress has often been slow.

1999 saw the release of WCAG 1.0, the first Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Developed by the W3C (the standards body that oversees the web), these guidelines set out an extensive list of best practices for creating accessible content.

Since then, WCAG has continued to evolve – today we’re at WCAG 2.2, with updates shaped by feedback from disability groups, developers, and web organisations. Each version reflects new technologies and user needs, so it’s vital for website owners to keep pace and ensure their content meets modern accessibility standards.

Accessibility benefits everyone

Accessibility doesn’t just benefit those with disabilities. In many cases, improving the accessibility of a website can make it easier to use for everyone, including people without disabilities.

This comic by Michael F Giangreco and Kevin Ruelle sums it up nicely:

You may not think you’ll be affected, but the following are all groups of people who benefit from improvements in web accessibility:

• people using mobile phones, smart watches, smart TVs, and other devices with small screens, different input modes, etc.
• older people with changing abilities due to ageing
• people with “temporary disabilities” such as a broken arm or lost glasses
• people with “situational limitations” such as in bright sunlight or in an environment where they cannot listen to audio
• people using a slow Internet connection, or who have limited or expensive bandwidth.

When you look at these examples, you can see how accessibility touches everyday life. Think about trying to fill out a form on your phone while juggling bags, or watching a video on mute in a noisy café – features like clear text, captions, and easy navigation suddenly become essential.

Our work on accessibility

In my role as Senior Digital Content Officer, one of my priorities has been to lead in this area, and over the last 18 months I’ve been working to research, describe and implement specific improvements to the accessibility of digital content on our website.

Some of these improvements were implemented very recently. Frequent visitors to this website may have noticed some of the changes – the most obvious being in how links look and how they behave when you mouse over them.

Ever struggled to figure out what’s a link on a web page? Links are a core part of the web, so they need to be clear – especially for users with vision challenges. Visible hover states help people spot interactive elements.

For example, using blue text for links is fine, but one key WCAG principle is that colour alone shouldn’t be the only way to show information, so another visual cue should be added. Underlining is the classic choice, though there are other options too!

With this in mind, we’ve made our mouseovers more visible for links on our website. We've also improved the visibility of ‘focus’ states – these are seen when navigating via keyboard (common for those users with motor issues that prevent the use of a mouse).

Here’s what the keyboard focus state of our main text links looked like before and after the recent improvements:

Before	After

Aside from the improvements that we’ve made by working with our web developer agency (Appius), we also run weekly checks using dedicated accessibility tools to help us improve pages across the site. Since March 2025, we’ve made over 500 fixes across hundreds of pages on this website.

This work is never finished, but we have now embedded a programme of continual accessibility improvements which will ensure that the website will become more accessible in successive years. We are also doing more to provide accessibility guidance and training to our colleagues who use our digital platforms.

If you have accessibility requirements and want to raise an issue about this website (or any of our digital channels), please get in touch with us as we’d love to hear your feedback.