Nursery Website Accessibility: A Practical Guide

Accessibility

Why accessibility matters for a nursery website

Think about who actually reads a nursery website. A mum with a newborn on one arm and a phone in the other hand. A grandad who has had his glasses on the wrong setting since 2019. A parent with dyslexia scanning a fees page. A dad who is colour blind trying to work out which days are green on your availability chart. A parent who uses a screen reader. None of them are edge cases. They are your parents, and an accessible website is simply one that works for all of them.

There is a legal angle too, but the practical one comes first: accessible websites are clearer, load faster and convert better, and the steps are not difficult.

What the law actually says

The Equality Act 2010

Service providers in the UK have a duty to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people, and GOV.UK is explicit that "all UK service providers have a legal obligation to make reasonable adjustments under the Equality Act 2010". A nursery is a service provider. A website that a disabled parent cannot use is the kind of barrier the duty is designed to remove.

The Public Sector Bodies accessibility regulations

The Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018 require public sector websites to meet WCAG 2.2 AA and publish an accessibility statement. They apply to public sector bodies, so a maintained nursery school or a setting run by a local authority is in scope. Private, voluntary and independent nurseries are not covered by these regulations. The Equality Act still applies to everyone.

WCAG 2.2: the standard everyone uses

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.2 are the international standard, and level AA is the benchmark GOV.UK points to. You do not need to certify against it, and be wary of anyone who says their template is "WCAG certified". What you can do is build and write with its principles in mind: perceivable, operable, understandable and robust.

Ten practical steps for a nursery website

1. Real text, not text in images

Fees in an image, a menu as a photograph of a printed sheet, opening hours baked into a banner: none of it can be read by a screen reader, enlarged cleanly or found by Google. Put it on the page as text. PDFs are fine as a download alongside, not instead.

2. Contrast that works in daylight

Pale grey text on white, or white text on a pastel background, fails for a lot of people and for everyone outside on a sunny day. WCAG 2.2 AA asks for a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 for normal text. Warm, friendly colours are fine. Use them for backgrounds and accents and keep the words dark on light.

3. Headings in order

One main heading per page, then sections and subsections in sequence. Screen reader users navigate by headings; so do skim-readers. It also happens to be what search engines want.

4. Alt text on every image that means something

"Preschool children planting sunflowers in the garden" tells a screen reader user what is there. "IMG_4821" does not. Decorative images can have empty alt text so they are skipped.

5. Links that say where they go

"Read our safeguarding policy" rather than "click here". Screen reader users often pull up a list of links on their own, and a list of "click here" is useless.

6. Forms that can be completed with a keyboard

Every field labelled, errors explained in words, no time limits, and a visible focus ring so keyboard users can see where they are. WCAG 2.2 added a requirement that the focus indicator is not hidden, and that any drag action has a simple alternative.

7. Buttons and targets big enough for thumbs

WCAG 2.2 also introduced a minimum target size. On a nursery website that mostly means the tap-to-call number and the book a visit button should be generous and not crowded by other links.

8. Text that can be enlarged

Parents enlarge text on phones all the time. The page should reflow rather than forcing sideways scrolling, and nothing important should disappear at 200 per cent.

9. Plain English

Short sentences, everyday words, no acronyms without explanation. "The EYFS" means nothing to a first-time parent until you say "the framework every early years setting in England follows". This helps parents with dyslexia, parents whose first language is not English, and everyone in a hurry.

10. Accessible documents

If you publish policies and menus as PDFs, make them real text rather than scans, give them a title, and keep headings in order. Our guide to publishing nursery policies has more on presenting documents well.

Video, motion and colour

• Captions on any video with speech
• No content that flashes
• Do not rely on colour alone to show availability or meaning: add a word or a symbol
• Let people pause anything that moves

Write an accessibility statement anyway

You are probably not required to publish one, but a short statement saying what you have done, what you know is not perfect, and how to ask for information in another format is honest, useful and cheap. Include a phone number and an email address. Some parents will simply ring and ask for the fees to be read out, and that is a reasonable adjustment too.

How to check your own website in ten minutes

• Tab through the home page without a mouse. Can you see where you are and reach everything?
• Turn on your phone’s screen reader (VoiceOver on iPhone, TalkBack on Android) and listen to the fees page.
• Zoom the browser to 200 per cent. Does anything break?
• Use a free contrast checker on your brand colours.
• Read the alt text of your ten most important images.

None of this replaces a proper audit, but it finds the problems parents hit most.

What we do on Little Fruitcakes websites

We build nursery websites on a platform that gives us proper heading structure, resizable text, keyboard-friendly forms and alt text on every image, and we write in plain English by default. We follow WCAG 2.2 principles as far as the platform allows. We do not claim certified compliance, because nobody honestly can without a full audit of every page, and we tell clients where the limits are. If you have a parent who needs something specific, tell us and we will do what we can.

Common questions

Sources

• Understanding accessibility requirements for public sector bodies, GOV.UK
• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2, W3C
• Equality Act 2010, section 20: duty to make adjustments