Question — answered
Does a private Saudi business website have to be accessible?
Accessibility vendors routinely claim Saudi law makes WCAG mandatory for private companies. We went to the sources: the Digital Government Authority's Guideline for Web Accessibility (December 2022), read in full, and the 2023 Rights of Persons with Disabilities Law. Here is what is actually required, from whom, and what a clinic or real-estate firm in Riyadh or Jeddah should sensibly do.
Quick answer
There is no verified hard WCAG mandate for private Saudi business websites today. The DGA's Guideline for Web Accessibility (3 December 2022) adopts WCAG 2.1 and states that government entities are required to meet at minimum Level AA — that sentence is about government websites and platforms, and the private sector is addressed only where it builds or operates digital government services. Separately, the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Law (Royal Decree M/27, 2023) replaced the 2000 welfare law and introduced inspection powers and serious penalties for rights violations across education, healthcare, employment and finance — but we found no official text tying those penalties to WCAG conformance of a private website. Practical translation: WCAG 2.1 AA is Saudi Arabia's named national bar, the legal direction of travel is unmistakable, and the sensible move for an SME — especially a clinic, whose patients skew older — is to build to AA now rather than litigate whether it must.
Who the DGA guideline covers, in its own structure
From the guideline's scope and target-audience sections, summarised — the guideline text prevails.
| Entity | Position under the guideline |
|---|---|
| Government entities (ministries, authorities, public institutions, centers) | Required to meet at minimum WCAG 2.1 Level AA — the guideline's own words |
| Private sector building or operating digital government services | In the stated target audience: designers, developers and content administrators of government-related platforms |
| Private businesses running their own websites | Not bound by this guideline — no AA mandate, no fine regime in the text |
| Beneficiaries the guideline protects | People with vision, hearing, motor and cognitive disabilities — and explicitly the elderly |
Source: Digital Government Authority, The Guideline for Web Accessibility of Websites — to serve people with disabilities and the elderly, 3 December 2022 (read in full, 30 October 2026). The 2023 Rights of Persons with Disabilities Law (Royal Decree M/27) sits above it as the general rights framework.
The technical bar: WCAG 2.1, with AA as the national reference
The guideline does not invent a Saudi standard — it adopts WCAG 2.1 wholesale and walks through the A, AA and AAA checklists criterion by criterion, with plain-language explanations and examples. Level A is described as the basic floor, Level AA as the minimum government entities must meet, and AAA as advanced. The DGA even names its preferred testing tools — Lighthouse, WAVE, Axe and Accessibility Insights — the same automated checks our own website audits run.
Two details worth noticing. First, like the UAE's 2024 policy, the Saudi guideline protects two groups, not one: people with disabilities and the elderly, named in its very title — a growing share of Gulf healthcare patients and property clients. Second, one checklist item matters doubly in Saudi Arabia: screen readers pronounce content based on the declared page language, so a correct lang attribute and true right-to-left markup are not cosmetic for an Arabic-first market — they are the difference between a site a blind Saudi user can hear correctly and one read out as gibberish.
What we measured on real Saudi websites
Our October 2026 scan included Lighthouse's automated accessibility audit on 560 clinic and real-estate websites in Riyadh and Jeddah. The sector medians sit at 88–90% — respectable-looking until you know that automated checks catch only a fraction of WCAG 2.1 AA. A quarter of every segment scores below 83–85% even on this partial, automated test, and the failures these audits most commonly flag — missing alternative text, form fields without labels, insufficient contrast — are exactly the basics the DGA's own checklist explains.
Where a measurement could not be taken, our reports say so — and the same honesty applies here: an automated score is a floor check, not a conformance claim. No tool certifies WCAG compliance; a human audit does. One Saudi-specific note: unlike Dubai, where Arabic is the open flank, Saudi sites are overwhelmingly Arabic-first — in our scans, 89–94% per city and sector carry Arabic — so the accessibility question is rarely whether Arabic exists, but whether it is marked up so assistive technology can actually read it.
- Run the free automated check first (our audit includes the accessibility score) — it catches the embarrassing basics
- Fix the checklist items that overlap with conversion: labelled forms, keyboard-reachable booking paths, readable contrast, correct Arabic lang and direction markup
- Clinics: the 2023 law names healthcare among its protected domains, and your patients skew older — treat WCAG 2.1 AA as your build target, not a legal debate
- Ignore any pitch that opens with 'Saudi law fines inaccessible private websites' — ask them to cite the article; the verified mandate is government Level AA
Frequently asked questions
We found no WCAG-based fine regime for private websites in the official texts we read. The DGA guideline's Level AA requirement is addressed to government entities, and while the 2023 Rights of Persons with Disabilities Law introduced inspections and serious penalties for rights violations, no official text we verified ties those penalties to the WCAG conformance of a private business website. That is a direction of travel, not an absence of reasons to act.
WCAG 2.1 Level AA — it is the bar the DGA itself names as the government minimum, which makes it the only defensible reference point in the Kingdom. For a 5–12-page site built this decade, most of AA is build discipline: semantic structure, labelled forms, contrast, keyboard navigation, alt text. It is dramatically cheaper at build time than as a retrofit.
It raises the stakes on markup. Screen readers choose pronunciation from the page's declared language, so an Arabic page served with a wrong or missing lang attribute is read incorrectly to blind users regardless of how good the content is. Correct right-to-left direction, readable Arabic fonts and bidirectional handling of embedded Latin text (brand names, phone numbers) are the Saudi-specific layer on top of the standard WCAG checklist.
Substantially — the overlap is structural, not coincidental. Semantic headings, alt text, clear language and working keyboard navigation are the same substrate search crawlers and AI assistants parse. The DGA's own recommended checkers (Lighthouse among them) score accessibility and SEO side by side for a reason.
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