If you design for a broker, mutual fund, investment adviser or any other SEBI-regulated business, 31 October 2026 should be on your wall. That is the extended deadline for completing accessibility audits of their digital platforms and fixing what the audits find. Engineering will do much of the fixing, but a lot of the failures start in design files: colour, focus states, labels, layouts that break at zoom. Here is what the rule asks for and a checklist you can run through your own screens this week.
What SEBI requires, briefly
SEBI's circular of 31 July 2025 made digital accessibility a regulatory requirement for regulated entities. According to this summary from DigitalA11Y, it covers "websites, mobile applications, investor portals, trading platforms, market disclosures, documents, and multimedia content", and points to these standards:
WCAG 2.1 Level AA (or later)
IS 17802, India's digital accessibility standard
The Government of India Web Guidelines (GIGW)
The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016
Entities also need a senior nodal officer for accessibility, a grievance mechanism, and audits involving IAAP-certified accessibility professionals, as Taxmann's note on the timelines sets out.
The deadlines have moved more than once. On 31 July 2026, SEBI extended the date for audits and remediation of audit findings to 31 October 2026. The extension report stresses that "the extension does not change the underlying accessibility requirements."
Why designers own a big share of this
Auditors test the built product, but many failures were decided in Figma. A low-contrast grey label, a focus state nobody drew, an icon-only button with no name, a table that only works at full width: none of these are coding bugs. They are design decisions that code faithfully reproduced.
Financial apps are especially prone. They are dense, full of numbers, colour-coded red and green, and packed with charts and PDFs. Each of those is a common accessibility trap.
The designer's checklist
Each item maps to a WCAG 2.1 AA success criterion from the W3C quick reference.
Colour and contrast
Text contrast (1.4.3): at least 4.5:1 for normal text, 3:1 for large text. Check your secondary greys, placeholder text and text on brand colours. Small grey timestamps under a portfolio value are a classic failure.
Non-text contrast (1.4.11): at least 3:1 for UI components and meaningful graphics. That includes input borders, toggle states, chart lines and the outline of a "Buy" button.
Do not rely on colour alone. Gains in green and losses in red should also carry a sign (+ or −), an arrow or a word. Picture a holdings list where the only difference between profit and loss is hue: for a user with red-green colour blindness, every row looks the same.
Layout and zoom
Resize text (1.4.4): text must scale to 200% without losing content or function. Test your order ticket at 200%: does the "Place order" button still appear, or does it fall off-screen?
Reflow (1.4.10): content must work at a width of 320 CSS pixels without two-way scrolling. Wide tables of holdings are the usual problem. Design a stacked card view for narrow widths instead of a table that scrolls sideways.
Interaction
Focus visible (2.4.7): draw the focus state for every interactive component in your design system. If it is not in the file, it will often not be in the build.
Labels or instructions (3.3.2): every field in KYC and order forms needs a visible label. Placeholder text that disappears on typing is not a label.
Label in name (2.5.3): if a button reads "Buy", its accessible name should contain "Buy", so voice-control users can say what they see.
Icon-only buttons: annotate the accessible name in your handoff ("Download statement", not "icon-download").
Images, charts and media
Text alternatives (1.1.1): charts need a text summary or an accessible data table. "Portfolio value rose 8% over 12 months, from ₹4.2 lakh to ₹4.5 lakh" serves a screen reader user better than a description of the chart's shape.
Captions (1.2.2): pre-recorded videos, such as onboarding explainers and webinars, need captions. The SEBI circular summary also mentions transcripts and Indian Sign Language support where possible.
Documents
The circular summary calls for tagged, accessible PDFs. Factsheets, statements and disclosures designed in a layout tool often export as untagged PDFs. Agree a tagged-PDF export process with whoever produces them, and check reading order.
Making it stick after 31 October
The deadline is for this round of fixes. SEBI's summary describes regular audits, and Taxmann notes annual audit reporting from 30 April 2027. So treat this as a design system job, not a one-off cleanup.
Put contrast-checked colour tokens in the system and retire the failing greys.
Give every component documented focus, error and disabled states.
Add an accessibility section to your handoff template: accessible names, reading order, alt text.
Include at least one screen reader and one keyboard-only pass in design review for every new flow.
Accessibility work for a regulator can feel like box-ticking. It is worth remembering who it is for: an investor using a screen reader to check a statement, or an older user zooming in to read a contract note. Designs that work for them tend to be clearer for everyone else too.
