How Scottish and Welsh language rules change website design briefs

What to take away

Why a Scottish or Welsh website brief starts with language duties, not design

In England, a public sector website brief usually opens with audience, services and accessibility. Cross the border into Scotland and Wales and a second question arrives first: which language duties apply to this body, and who signs them off?

A website design company Scotland or Wales teams hire will be judged on that answer. A council in Wales cannot treat Welsh as a translation afterthought, because the duty sits on the service, not on the marketing department.

For buyers, the practical effect is sequencing. Language obligations define content volume, page count, navigation labels, form wording and testing effort. Get those numbers first and the design scope becomes honest.

They also define procurement. Public bodies in Scotland and Wales buying digital work must weigh social value and local economic benefit alongside price, which is set out in the government's guidance on procurement in the national interest.

That guidance does not name languages, but it explains why a Welsh or Scottish brief often asks suppliers to show how they will deliver bilingual content without inflating cost.

Compliance duties sit on the organisation, not the agency. A supplier can build the site, but the body remains accountable for meeting its language scheme, its data protection duties under UK GDPR and its accessibility obligations.

The Business and self-employed pages are a reasonable starting point for directors checking which duties attach to their organisation before they write a brief.

Welsh language standards and what they require of public-facing websites

Welsh language standards are the duties made under the Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2011 and imposed on named public bodies by the Welsh Language Commissioner. They replaced the older scheme system with enforceable standards.

One example is the Welsh Language Standards (No. 1) Regulations 2015, which set standards for bodies including Welsh Ministers and county councils. The Welsh Language Commissioner is the regulator and the route for complaints about a breach.

For websites, the standards cover service delivery, policy making and internal operations. The service delivery standards are the ones that land on a website project.

In practice, a body subject to the standards must treat Welsh no less favourably than English. That means a Welsh speaker should not have to ask for Welsh, or click through an English page to find it.

The main website consequences are predictable once you list them:

Standards are not identical for every body. Some face more standards than others, and the Commissioner publishes compliance notices and investigation reports. A brief should cite the body's own standards notice, not a generic summary.

Third sector bodies are usually not bound by the standards in the same way as public bodies. But charities receiving Welsh Government funding, or delivering public services under contract, often inherit language expectations through the funding agreement.

That distinction matters commercially. A charity brief may say bilingual by choice, while a health board brief says bilingual by duty. The design and content effort is similar; the evidence trail is not.

Welsh Government policy also pushes towards more Welsh in digital services, and the Commissioner has been clear that a machine-translated page does not discharge a standard. Quality is part of the duty. Cymraeg 2050, the Welsh Government strategy, targets one million Welsh speakers by 2050. The Senedd operates bilingually and is subject to Welsh language standards.

Gaelic provisions in Scotland and where they bite on a website project

Scotland has no equivalent of the Welsh language standards for most bodies. Gaelic provisions instead arrive through the Gaelic Language (Scotland) Act 2005 and the work of Bòrd na Gàidhlig.

The Act requires public bodies named in an order to prepare a Gaelic language plan, approved by the Bòrd. Those plans set out how the body will use Gaelic in services, signage, publicity and staff training.

One example is The Highland Council's Gaelic Language Plan, approved by Bòrd na Gàidhlig, which commits the council to Gaelic in services and signage. Bòrd na Gàidhlig approves plans and monitors delivery.

A Gaelic language plan is where a website project usually meets Gaelic provisions. Plans commonly commit the body to bilingual pages, Gaelic naming of services, and Gaelic content in recruitment and public information.

The bite points on a build are narrower than in Wales, but real:

There is also a practical supply question. Gaelic translation capacity is thinner than Welsh, so a brief should name the translation route and the turnaround time before design starts.

Education, culture and island authorities tend to have the strongest Gaelic commitments, and island councils in Scotland and Wales share the problem of thin supplier markets. A national body may hold a plan with modest website duties. The brief should quote the plan, not assume.

Place names are a common flashpoint. Gaelic and Scots forms of names appear on signage and in tourism content, and getting them wrong is visible to the communities the site serves.

Scottish accessibility duties run alongside this. Public sector sites must meet accessibility regulations, and the Government Digital Service publishes standards and guidance that public sector bilingual sites follow through Government Digital Service - GOV.UK.

If your organisation works across both nations, treat the duties separately. Welsh duties come from standards notices under the Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2011. Scottish Gaelic duties come from the Gaelic Language (Scotland) Act 2005 and approved plans. Our guide to mapping regulations by jurisdiction explains why a single compliance narrative fails when England, Scotland and Wales diverge.

Content, navigation and accessibility consequences for a website design company

Language duties change the shape of a build. The clearest example is bilingual navigation: labels must work in both languages without truncating, and the language switcher must be findable on every page.

Navigation labels in Welsh are often longer than their English equivalents. A menu built around short English words will break when the Welsh version arrives, so test the longest string first.

Bilingual website design also affects page structure. If both languages sit on one site, URLs, breadcrumbs and search results must keep users in the language they chose.

Accessibility and language interact in ways buyers often miss. Screen readers rely on correct language attributes, so each page must declare whether it is Welsh, Gaelic or English.

Mixing languages on one page without marking the change confuses assistive technology. That is a defect, not a stylistic choice.

An accessibility statement should name the languages the site supports, the standards met, known gaps and how to report a problem. It is a public document, and it should be reviewed on a schedule.

Our web design agency accessibility UK checklist covers the evidence a buyer should expect before sign-off.

Content operations matter as much as templates. Two language versions double the publishing workload, so the brief must say who writes each version and how updates stay synchronised.

Common failure modes are consistent across projects:

Each of these is cheaper to prevent in the brief than to fix after launch. A design agency can only build to the requirement it is given.

Here is a short checklist for the buyer's side of the table:

Accessibility testing in Welsh and Gaelic is the step most often skipped. Automated tools catch markup errors, but a Welsh-speaking user testing a form is the only way to know the route works.

Our web design brief template shows how these rows fit into a standard brief without turning it into a legal document.

Finally, think about tone. Welsh and Gaelic content written as literal translation reads badly. Budget for transcreation, not word-for-word conversion, on the pages that carry the service.

Bilingual SEO, metadata and URL structure decisions

Search behaviour differs by language and by nation. A Welsh speaker searching for a service may use Welsh terms that never appear in an English keyword list, so keyword research must run in both languages.

Metadata is where bilingual SEO is usually lost. Titles, descriptions and headings need writing natively in each language, not translated from the English draft.

URL structure is the decision that is hardest to reverse. The common options are a subdirectory, a subdomain, or a separate domain per language.

For most public bodies in Scotland and Wales, a subdirectory with hreflang tags is the pragmatic choice. It keeps authority on one domain and makes the language pair explicit to search engines.

Hreflang must be reciprocal and self-referencing. If the Welsh page points to the English one, the English page must point back, or the signal is ignored.

For example, a Welsh service page at /cy/gwasanaethau and its English equivalent at /en/services would use this pair:

Welsh page: hreflang cy -> https://example.org/cy/gwasanaethau; hreflang en -> https://example.org/en/services
English page: hreflang en -> https://example.org/en/services; hreflang cy -> https://example.org/cy/gwasanaethau
x-default -> https://example.org/en/services

The two pages must point to each other, and each must point to itself.

Language choice should also persist. If a user selects Welsh, internal links, search results and error pages should stay in Welsh for the session.

Gaelic SEO is a smaller but real consideration. Search volume is low, yet the pages that exist should be indexed properly, especially for education, culture and place-name queries.

Sitemaps should include both language versions. Analytics should segment by language so the buyer can see whether Welsh and Gaelic pages are actually used.

A note on duplication. Machine translation of a full site creates near-duplicate pages that can dilute search performance. Human-written or human-checked copy avoids that trap.

Keep the language switcher out of the footer only. It belongs in the header, labelled in both languages, and it should never reset the user's position.

Brief template rows that record language obligations and evidence

A brief is a procurement document as much as a design one. Language rows make the requirement testable, and they give the supplier something concrete to price.

The rows below are the ones that carry the most weight in a Scottish or Welsh project.

Each row should name a person, not a team. Language duties fail in the gap between the communications team and the digital team.

Build a gate structure into the project so evidence is checked before the next stage begins. Our selection checklist on what to verify at every gate applies to language evidence as much as to code quality.

Commissioning bodies in Scotland and Wales should also ask for a post-launch review. Standards and Gaelic plans are living commitments, and the website will need to change as they do.

Lastly, make sure the brief is short enough that it can be read. A language section of one page, with the table above, will do more than ten pages of policy quotation.

Common questions