EdLaw
UK — Equality Act 2010 (accessibility via reasonable adjustments)
The UK's accessibility law is not a technical standard but the anticipatory duty to make reasonable adjustments — the reason schools ask vendors for accessible products.
Applicability to EdTech
- The duty's three requirements (section 20): change provisions/criteria/practices, remove or alter physical features, and — the one that reaches us — provide auxiliary aids and services, expressly including information in an accessible format (s 20(6)). For schools the duty is anticipatory: they must plan for disabled pupils in general, so they procure against accessibility expectations rather than reacting per-pupil.
- Schools (section 85): discrimination is prohibited in admissions and "in the way it provides education" — a digital lesson a disabled pupil cannot use is squarely a s 85 problem for the school, and by procurement flow-down a problem for us; the reasonable-adjustments duty applies to schools via s 85(6) and Schedule 13.
- Services (section 29): our direct-to-consumer surfaces owe the duty in their own right.
- Practical bar: WCAG conformance (as in PSBAR and EN 301 549) is the accepted evidence of adjustment for digital products, though the Act itself never names a standard.
Contents
| Document | Covers |
|---|---|
| REASONABLE-ADJUSTMENTS.md | sections 20, 29, 85 |
Enforcement
Private claims (county court / tribunals for schools); EHRC enforcement powers. No fixed fines — remedies are damages and declarations.
Licence
The corpus reproduces the consolidated text of the Equality Act 2010 from legislation.gov.uk. The legislation.gov.uk footer (read 2026-10-01 on legislation.gov.uk) says: "All content is available under the Open Government Licence v3.0 except where otherwise stated." and "© Crown and database right". The text is Crown copyright, which is not an exclusion from copyright, so the label is open-licence.
The Open Government Licence v3.0 (read 2026-10-01) says: "You are free to: copy, publish, distribute and transmit the Information; adapt the Information; exploit the Information commercially and non-commercially". Its conditions: "acknowledge the source of the Information in your product or application by including or linking to any attribution statement specified by the Information Provider(s) and, where possible, provide a link to this licence", and, where no statement is specified, "Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0."; and, under Non-endorsement, the licence "does not grant you any right to use the Information in a way that suggests any official status or that the Information Provider and/or Licensor endorse you or your use of the Information."
Conditions, and how this corpus meets them:
- Acknowledge the source: each provision carries a
{.meta}provenance line naming legislation.gov.uk with the consolidation date, and Sources links the publication. Attribution statement: "Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0." (licence). - Non-endorsement: the corpus does not claim official status or endorsement by the Crown or The National Archives.
- Changes: the OGL does not require changes to be marked; the selection, layout and added anchors are described in Meta.
- Exemptions: no personal data, logos, crests or Royal Arms are reproduced.
The EHRC page listed in Sources is cited, not reproduced.
Related
- Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018 — the technical-standard layer for public-sector websites/apps
- EU Web Accessibility Directive, US §504/§508 — siblings