IFA Website Accessibility: What the FCA Expects in 2026

A 68-year-old who has just been widowed is using her phone to work out whether your practice can help with her late husband's SIPP. Your body copy is light grey on white. Your contact form is seven fields long. The font is set too small to read without reading glasses, which are in the kitchen. She closes the tab. She never comes back.

That is what IFA website accessibility looks like from the outside in 2026. Not a technical niche for WCAG specialists, but a quiet filter between your practice and the clients who most need you. The Financial Conduct Authority has started treating it the same way.

What is changing in 2026?

The Consumer Duty came into force in July 2023. For the first two years the FCA focused on implementation: were firms putting the frameworks in place, collecting outcomes data, thinking about vulnerability at all. In 2026 the regulator has said it expects firms to move from "are you ready?" to "show us the outcomes you are actually delivering."

Vulnerable customer outcomes sit at the top of that list. In March 2026 the FCA and the Information Commissioner's Office issued a joint statement reinforcing what firms should already be doing: identifying vulnerability, handling the data appropriately, and making sure outcomes for vulnerable clients are as good as those experienced by other customers.

Your website is part of that journey. It is usually the first touchpoint a vulnerable client has with your practice. If it excludes them before a conversation has started, that is a Consumer Duty problem, not a marketing one.

Who counts as a vulnerable client on your website?

The FCA defines a vulnerable consumer as someone who, because of their personal circumstances, is especially susceptible to detriment. That is a broader definition than most advisers assume. It goes well beyond the obvious category of "people with a disability."

Four drivers of vulnerability sit in the FCA guidance:

1. Health: physical disabilities, cognitive impairment, mental health conditions, long-term conditions that affect concentration or energy
2. Life events: bereavement, divorce, redundancy, retirement, caring responsibilities
3. Resilience: low financial resilience, thin savings buffers, unmanageable debt
4. Capability: low confidence with money, limited numeracy, low digital skills, difficulty interpreting dense text

An IFA's target market leans heavily toward at least two of those drivers. Retirees, recently widowed spouses, and clients going through divorce settlements all sit firmly inside the FCA definition. For many advisers, most enquiries come from people the regulator considers vulnerable at the moment of first contact.

That number is the one to hold in mind when you look at your own website. Roughly half the people arriving on your homepage are, in the FCA's view, at heightened risk of detriment if your communications do not work for them.

What does IFA website accessibility actually mean?

There are three layers to think about, and they stack rather than compete.

The legal layer. The Equality Act 2010 requires service providers, including adviser firms, to make reasonable adjustments so that disabled people can use their services. UK courts treat the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 2.2 AA as the working benchmark for what "reasonable" means online. WCAG is technical. It covers colour contrast, keyboard navigation, alt text on images, form labels, focus indicators, video captions, and more.

The FCA layer. The Consumer Duty goes further than the Equality Act. Accessibility under the Duty is not only about disability. It is about whether your communications help or hurt customer understanding for people in any vulnerable circumstance. Plain English, clear structure, layered information, and alternative routes to the same answer all sit inside this layer.

The human layer. Can a tired, recently bereaved 68-year-old actually use your site on her phone at 9pm without help from a family member? If the honest answer is no, the other two layers have not done their job.

The six things most IFA websites get wrong

After reviewing hundreds of adviser sites, the same six problems come up again and again. None of them are exotic. All of them are fixable without rebuilding the site.

1. Low-contrast text. Light grey body copy on white backgrounds looks tasteful in a design mockup and is unreadable for anyone with ageing eyes. WCAG 2.2 AA requires a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for body text. A surprising number of adviser sites sit at 3.1:1 or lower.
2. Small default font. A 14px body font fails most users over 55 on a phone. 16px is the practical floor. If you would not want to read your site's paragraphs on a bus without your glasses, your older clients do not want to either.
3. Dense jargon. "Holistic advice," "decumulation," "drawdown crystallisation" — all sensible terms to an adviser, all white noise to someone reading their first adviser website. The FCA's "consumer understanding" outcome specifically calls this out.
4. Long contact forms. Seven fields is standard. Three of those fields are the point of failure for someone who is tired, stressed, or unfamiliar with online forms.
5. No keyboard or screen reader support. Forms built without proper labels, PDFs uploaded as images instead of real text, buttons that only respond to a mouse. This alone fails WCAG.
6. No easy route to speak to a human. The most vulnerable clients often need to start with a question rather than a commitment. If the only way into your practice is "Book a 30-minute call," many of them simply leave.

How to check your own site in under ten minutes

You do not need a formal audit to start. Five things tell you most of what you need to know.

1. Open your site on your phone, not your desktop. Hold it one-handed. Can you read the body text without zooming?
2. Run your homepage through a free contrast checker (WebAIM's is fine). Anything below 4.5:1 for body text fails.
3. Paste two paragraphs of your body copy into the Hemingway editor. If it reads as grade 11 or higher, your copy is excluding the clients most likely to need you.
4. Try to make a simple enquiry without using a mouse. If you cannot tab through the contact form and submit it, a screen reader user cannot either.
5. Ask the honest question: if my mother wanted to enquire about pension advice using this website at 9pm after a tiring day, would she succeed?

For a wider look at how Consumer Duty principles apply across your site as a whole, see our earlier guide to Consumer Duty and your IFA website.

Where chat widgets fit in

Accessibility is not solved by a single tool, but there are structural reasons chat interfaces help vulnerable clients succeed where long contact forms fail them.

• Typing one question is cognitively lighter than completing seven form fields.
• Plain-language answers pulled from your existing site content meet the FCA's "consumer understanding" outcome more naturally than polished marketing copy.
• Voice-to-text on a phone works well in a chat box and poorly in a form.
• A chat conversation ends naturally with "would you like someone to call you?" That is the low-friction route to a human that many vulnerable clients actually want.

None of this replaces the rest of the work. Contrast ratios, font sizes, keyboard support, and plain English still matter. But a well-designed chat interface removes one of the biggest single barriers between a vulnerable client and your practice: the long contact form at the bottom of a page she has already struggled to read.

Where to start

If your website has not been reviewed for accessibility since the Consumer Duty came into force, it is due. You do not need to rebuild. The highest-impact changes are unglamorous: nudge the body text up to 16px, fix the grey-on-white contrast, rewrite your top three landing pages in plain English, and give visitors an easy way to ask a question before they have to decide whether to book a call.

ChatIFA adds the chat layer to that list. You can try it free on your own site with 25 messages and no payment details at chatifa.co.uk, or watch a two-minute instant demo before signing up.