WCAG 2.1 and 2.2, explained in plain language.

1. What WCAG is

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are the international standard for making websites usable by people with disabilities: people who are blind or have low vision, who cannot use a mouse, who are deaf, who have tremors, or who find complex pages hard to process. They are written by the W3C, the body that maintains web standards, and nearly every accessibility law in the world points at them.

The whole standard hangs on four ideas. Content must be:

• Perceivable. People can take it in. Images carry text descriptions, videos carry captions, text has enough contrast against its background.
• Operable. People can use it. Everything works with a keyboard alone, targets are big enough to tap, nothing traps or rushes the visitor.
• Understandable. People can follow it. Forms explain their errors, navigation stays consistent, language is identified so screen readers pronounce it correctly.
• Robust. Assistive technology can read it. The code identifies what each control is, so a screen reader knows a button is a button.

Each idea breaks down into testable rules called success criteria. When someone says a site "meets WCAG 2.2 AA", they mean it passes every criterion in version 2.2 at levels A and AA.

2. WCAG 2.1 vs 2.2, what actually changed

Versions build on each other. WCAG 2.1 (2018) took everything in 2.0 and added rules for phones, low vision and cognitive load. WCAG 2.2 (October 2023) is the current version: it takes everything in 2.1 and adds nine criteria, most of them about focus, touch targets and forms. One old rule about code parsing was retired because modern browsers made it redundant.

The practical part: a site built to 2.2 AA automatically satisfies 2.1 AA, because the newer version contains the older one. These are the nine additions:

If your site already meets 2.1 AA, closing the gap to 2.2 AA is usually days of work, most of it in focus styles, target sizes and login forms.

3. The three levels: A, AA, AAA

• Level A is the floor. Failing it means some visitors are locked out entirely: images with no descriptions, pages a keyboard cannot operate, videos with no alternative.
• Level AA is the standard almost every law, contract and procurement checklist means when it says "accessible". It adds contrast minimums, visible focus, error suggestions, consistent navigation and text resizing.
• Level AAA is the enhanced tier: higher contrast, sign language for video, simpler language. Whole sites rarely claim it, and no major law requires it. Sensible teams adopt individual AAA rules where they are cheap, and skip the rest.

4. The dates that matter

You do not need to memorise the laws. You need to know which ones name a version and a date, because that is what buyers, insurers and procurement teams check.

• United States, public bodies. The Department of Justice rule under the ADA requires state and local government websites to meet WCAG 2.1 AA, by April 2026 for larger jurisdictions and April 2027 for smaller ones. Anyone selling websites to a city, county, school district or public university inherits that requirement.
• United States, private businesses. No regulation names a version, but courts and the Department of Justice have consistently pointed to WCAG as the reference standard when web access is challenged, and lawsuits against ordinary business websites are filed every week.
• European Union. The European Accessibility Act has applied since June 2025 to most consumer-facing online services, including online shops. Its technical standard, EN 301 549, points to WCAG 2.1 AA.
• United Kingdom. Public sector sites have been regulated since 2018; the government's monitoring body now tests against WCAG 2.2 AA.
• Elsewhere. Canada, Australia and others reference WCAG AA in their own rules. The pattern is the same everywhere: AA, with the cited version slowly moving forward.

5. What to prioritise on a business website

A few criteria do most of the work for most visitors. If your budget or attention is limited, fix these first, in roughly this order:

• Keyboard access. Every menu, form and popup works with Tab and Enter alone, and you can always see which item has focus.
• Colour contrast. Body text at 4.5 to 1 against its background. This is the single most commonly failed rule on the web.
• Names and labels. Every image has a description, every form field has a label, every button and link says what it does.
• Forms that explain themselves. Errors are announced, described in text, and tell the visitor how to fix them.
• Target size and spacing. Tap targets at least 24 pixels, links not crowded together.
• Structure. Real headings in a sensible order, a declared page language, and a skip link so keyboard users are not forced through the menu on every page.

6. The problems we find most often

WebAIM's annual scan of the top million home pages finds detectable WCAG failures on well over nine in ten of them, and the same handful of issues top the list every year. Ours match it:

• Text over images or in light grey that fails contrast.
• Images with no description, or a filename where the description should be.
• Links that read "click here" or "read more" with nothing about the destination.
• Form fields with placeholder text instead of labels.
• Menus and carousels that only work with a mouse.
• No visible focus outline, usually removed on purpose years ago for looks.
• PDFs that are scans of paper, unreadable to any screen reader.
• Autoplaying video or animation with no way to stop it.

Most of these are cheap to fix once found. Finding all of them is the part that takes discipline, because roughly a third of the criteria cannot be tested by software at all.

7. What the work actually involves

Real accessibility work is a cycle, and it looks the same whether we built the site or someone else did:

• Audit. An automated scan of every template, then a human pass: full keyboard run-through, a screen reader session, zoom to 200 percent, forms filled wrongly on purpose. The result is a list of failures, each tied to the criterion it breaks and ranked by how badly it blocks a visitor.
• Repair. Fixes are made in the site's own code and content, starting with the blockers. On a typical business site the heavy lifting sits in templates, so fixing one template fixes hundreds of pages.
• Verify. The same tests are run again, and the results are written up so you can show them to whoever asked: a customer, a procurement team, a lawyer.
• Maintain. Every edit your team makes can introduce a new issue, so accessibility gets re-checked as content changes, the statement page is kept current, and new features are tested before launch. This is why our care plans include accessibility re-checks rather than treating the audit as a one-time event.

8. The baseline we recommend, and why

Clients ask us to just pick a standard for them, so here it is, with the reasoning in the open:

• Why AA and not A: every law, tender and checklist that names a level names AA. Level A alone leaves visitors locked out and buyers unsatisfied.
• Why 2.2 and not 2.1: 2.2 contains all of 2.1, the additions are modest, and regulators are already moving to it. Building to the older version buys nothing and schedules a second round of work later.
• Why not AAA: no law requires it and parts of it are impractical for most organisations. We adopt the cheap AAA habits, like strong focus outlines, and say so, rather than claiming a level we could not honestly hold across a whole site.
• Long term: treat accessibility like security, a property you maintain rather than a certificate you frame. Re-check when content changes, keep the statement page honest, and put someone's name on it.

For our own builds this is not an extra: the standard is part of the quote, the accessibility statement ships with the site, and the 30 days of onboarding support covers questions your editors have about keeping new content accessible.

9. Check your site free

Our free checker reads a page and lists the common failures in plain language, each tied to the WCAG rule it breaks. It is a first look, honestly labelled: software catches the mechanical problems, and the criteria that need human judgement still need a human.

Run the free WCAG check Talk it through on a free call

Useful outside resources

• WCAG at a glance, the W3C's own two-minute summary.
• How to meet WCAG 2.2, the full checklist, filterable by level.
• WebAIM contrast checker, for testing any two colours in seconds.