EdLaw
UK — PSBAR 2018 (public-sector web and app accessibility)
The UK's retained transposition of the EU Web Accessibility Directive: public-sector websites and mobile apps must be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust, with a published accessibility statement.
Applicability to EdTech
- Who is bound: public sector bodies (regulation 3), with a partial carve-out for schools and nurseries — exempt except for content relating to essential online administrative functions (regulation 4(1)(c)). The portal a parent must use to pay for lunches or book parents' evening is in scope.
- The requirement (regulation 4): POUR conformance, presumed via the harmonised standard (EN 301 549 → WCAG); disproportionate burden is the assessed escape valve (regulation 6); an accessibility statement is mandatory (regulation 7); monitoring/enforcement per regulation 8.
- Vendor consequence: our platform is not itself a public-sector body, but a school using it for essential administrative functions inherits the duty — so UK tenders ask for WCAG conformance and statement inputs. The private-sector analogue arrives via the European Accessibility Act for EU-market surfaces.
Contents
| Document | Covers |
|---|---|
| ACCESSIBILITY-REQUIREMENT.md | regulations 3, 4, 6, 7, 8 |
Enforcement
Government Digital Service monitoring; EHRC (and ECNI) enforcement via the Equality Act 2010 reasonable-adjustments route.
Licence
The corpus reproduces the consolidated text of the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018 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 gov.uk guidance listed in Sources is cited, not reproduced.
Related
- Equality Act 2010 — the enforcement substrate
- EU Web Accessibility Directive — the origin instrument
- EN 301 549 V3.2.1 (with its successor V4.1.1) and WCAG — the harmonised standard and the guidelines the presumption runs through