Equality Act 2010

The Equality Act 2010 is the UK law that upholds equal access and prohibits discrimination. It brought earlier laws against unfair treatment, such as the Race Relations Act and the Disability Discrimination Act, together into one Act, so those older laws no longer apply — the Equality Act 2010 is the one that does.

Under the Act, discrimination in access to information and services is illegal. An organisation, or an individual working within it, that discriminates can be prosecuted, so providing fair access is a legal duty rather than a goodwill gesture.

What counts as discrimination

Discrimination can take several forms when you provide information or run a service:

• Offensive content — words, pictures or jokes that insult a group of people, such as a climbing centre's printed welcome leaflet that includes a mocking joke about people with dwarfism.
• Failing to provide accessibility tools to a member of staff — a hotel that refuses to fit a hearing loop at its busy reception desk, so the receptionist who is hard of hearing cannot hear guests checking in or ask them to repeat themselves. Treating an employee this way is discrimination too, and the hotel can be prosecuted.
• Offering content in one inaccessible format only — a bowling alley that shows its lane prices only as a colour-coded chart, so a visitor with colour vision deficiency cannot tell the prices apart. Adding text labels to each colour removes the barrier.

Plan access from the start

Because the duty is legal, an organisation must think about access before it launches a service, rather than waiting for a complaint and patching things afterwards. Checking keyboard access, text alternatives and captions at the design stage is cheaper than rebuilding later, and it keeps the organisation within the law.