Jurisdictions — Europe
Website accessibility for Scottish organisations: the rules that actually apply in Scotland
The question Scottish clients are asking
Accessibility guidance is usually written for "the UK" and quietly means England. If you serve Scottish clients — a Glasgow retailer, an Edinburgh charity, a public body — here is what actually applies in Scotland, including the piece that is Scotland-specific.
What is true, verified
- The Equality Act 2010 applies in Scotland. It covers Great Britain, so the duty on service providers to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people — websites included — is the same baseline in Scotland as in England and Wales. WCAG conformance is the de-facto evidence a provider points to when the duty is questioned.
- Scottish public bodies have the explicit web rules. The Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018 apply to Scottish public-sector organisations: a WCAG-based standard plus a published accessibility statement. Councils, NHS boards, universities and their suppliers are measured against this.
- Scotland has its own layer: the BSL (Scotland) Act 2015. Scottish public bodies must publish British Sign Language plans under a Scotland-only statute — a commitment with no direct equivalent in England. If your client is a Scottish public body (or sells to one), BSL provision belongs on the accessibility agenda alongside WCAG.
- The EAA question gets asked in Scotland too — same answer as the rest of the UK. The European Accessibility Act does not apply to UK-only operations post-Brexit; a Scottish business selling in-scope services to consumers in the EU is pulled in for those services.
How to check a client site yourself
- Accessibility signals: run an automated WCAG checker (axe-core is the open-source standard) on the key templates — home, service page, contact form. Automated checks catch the mechanical failures complaints cite first.
- Consent posture: load the site cold and watch what fires before consent (UK GDPR/PECR).
- Broken links and SEO basics: cover the 404s and missing metadata in the same pass.
- Document what you saw: capture the page state behind every finding. An audit that cannot show its evidence is an opinion.
The honest shortcut
We built SiteComply to do exactly that pass — accessibility signals, consent posture, broken links, SEO basics — in a single $29 audit where every finding points to the exact page state we observed. White-label friendly, built for agency portfolios, and it never claims more than it verified.