On July 31, 2026, SEBI told every regulated financial platform in India to bring its websites, apps, and investor portals up to WCAG 2.1 AA. The audit phase is already done. The remediation deadline, extended once already, lands October 31, 2026, and the penalties on the table run past ₹25 crore for the worst offenders.
This post is the accessibility audit checklist we run on every Redmonk project, what SEBI's rule actually asks for, and why it is worth running even if no regulator is watching your business.
What SEBI's Deadline Actually Requires
Strip away the circular language and the requirement is specific. SEBI-regulated entities (brokers, mutual funds, listed companies, wealth platforms) have to bring the following up to WCAG 2.1/2.2 Level AA, backed by IS 17802, GIGW 3.0, and the older Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016:
- Public websites and informational pages
- iOS and Android apps
- Trading platforms and dashboards
- e-KYC and video-KYC flows
- Investor communications and downloadable PDFs
- Account management portals
The audit itself had to be done by an IAAP-certified accessibility professional, combining automated testing, manual code review, and usability testing with people who actually use assistive technology. A compliance status report was due earlier this year. What's left is remediation, and that deadline is the one that just got pushed to October 31, 2026.
Miss it, and the penalties scale with how bad the miss is: routine violations run up to ₹1 lakh a day capped at ₹1 crore, serious cases run ₹10 lakh to ₹25 crore or three times the unlawful profit, and repeated complaints can trigger registration suspension or debarment from the securities market.
The Accessibility Audit Checklist We Run Before Any Redesign
You don't need to be SEBI-regulated to run this. It's the same checklist we go through before touching a line of code on any project:
- Does body text hit a 4.5:1 colour contrast ratio against its background, and large text or UI components at least 3:1?
- Can every interactive element — menu, form, modal, carousel — be reached and operated with a keyboard alone, with a visible focus state?
- Do images and icons carry alt text that describes what they mean, not a filename or “image-123.png”?
- Are form fields tied to real labels, not placeholder text that vanishes the moment someone starts typing?
- Is the heading structure an actual outline (one H1, nested H2s and H3s), or is it just text styled to look like a heading?
- Does video or audio content carry captions or a transcript?
- Are touch targets big enough (44x44px is the usual baseline) for someone using the site one-handed, or with limited dexterity?
- Read the page with a screen reader on. Does it make sense in the order it's read, or does it turn into noise the moment you look away from the screen?
Most sites fail two or three of these on the first pass. That's normal. What matters is fixing them before the next redesign ships, not bolting on an overlay widget afterward and calling it done.
Why This Is Worth Doing Even If SEBI Doesn't Regulate You
The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 already applies well beyond BFSI — it covers public and private services generally, so the legal exposure was never limited to SEBI's list. SEBI just gave one industry a hard deadline and a number attached to it.
There's also a plainer business case. The things that make a site accessible — semantic HTML, real heading structure, meaningful alt text, clean focus order — are largely the same things that make it easier for Google to crawl and easier for anyone on a slow connection or an older phone to actually use. An accessibility audit and a technical SEO audit overlap more than most founders expect.
And the audience is broader than a compliance checkbox suggests. Older users, people on a cracked screen or a low-end Android phone, someone reading in bright sunlight with one hand full — all of them benefit from the same fixes a screen-reader user needs. If your site works for the hardest case, it works better for everyone above it.
The Takeaway
- SEBI's October 31, 2026 deadline is legally binding only for regulated entities, but WCAG 2.1 AA is the right bar for any business website, not just the ones with a regulator watching.
- Run the checklist above on your own site this month. It takes an afternoon and it tells you exactly where a redesign brief needs to start.
- Treat accessibility as part of the brief from day one, not a plugin bolted on after launch. It's a different quality of fix, and it holds up better under an actual audit.
Curious where your site stands, whether SEBI's deadline applies to you or not? Start a project with our design and development team, or book a free consultation and we'll walk the checklist against your site together.
