WCAG 2.2

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are the technical core that almost every accessibility law in the world points to — directly or through a regional standard such as Europe’s EN 301 549. WCAG 2.2 is the current version, published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as a formal Recommendation in October 2023. If you make one part of the web accessible to a known measure, this is the measure.

What it is

WCAG is a single, testable yardstick for whether digital content can be used by people with disabilities — including people who are blind or low-vision, Deaf or hard of hearing, who have motor or cognitive disabilities, or who rely on assistive technology such as screen readers, magnifiers, or switch devices. It is organised as a hierarchy you can hold in your head:

  • 4 principles — content must be Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust. Remembered as POUR.
  • 13 guidelines — broad goals under each principle, such as “Provide text alternatives” or “Make all functionality keyboard-operable”.
  • 87 success criteria — the specific, pass-or-fail statements you actually test a page against. Each criterion is tagged with a conformance level.

The success criteria are deliberately technology-neutral: they describe outcomes (“the error is identified in text”), not implementations, so the same guideline holds whether you build with HTML, a native app, or something that doesn’t exist yet.

Who must comply

WCAG itself is a voluntary W3C standard — it has no jurisdiction and binds no one on its own. Its force comes from the laws and procurement rules that adopt it by reference. In practice that is nearly all of them: the EU’s EN 301 549 (and through it the European Accessibility Act and the Web Accessibility Directive), the United States’ Section 508 and ADA, the UK, Canada, Australia, and many more all define “accessible” by citing WCAG at a specific version and level.

Because of that, the practical question is rarely “does WCAG apply to me?” but “which version and level does my regulator require, and have I met it?” Most laws target Level AA. Some still reference WCAG 2.0 or 2.1, but 2.2 is backwards-compatible: content that meets 2.2 meets the earlier versions too.

Relationship to WCAG

Here WCAG is the standard, so the “relationship” is really how its three conformance levels work — because that is what laws pick from. Every success criterion carries exactly one level, and the levels nest: meeting AA requires meeting all A criteria as well.

The three WCAG conformance levels
Level Meaning In practice
A Minimum — the most essential barriers. Necessary but not sufficient; almost no law stops here.
AA Addresses the major, common barriers. The level nearly every law and contract targets. This is the working bar.
AAA The highest, most demanding bar. Not expected across a whole site; applied selectively where it fits.

Conformance is all-or-nothing per level for a full page: a page conforms to AA only if it meets every applicable A and AA criterion. You can’t pass “most” of them and claim the level — one unmet criterion drops the whole page.

Key points

  • WCAG 2.2 is a W3C Recommendation from October 2023 — the current, stable version.
  • Structure: 4 principles (POUR) → 13 guidelines → 87 success criteria, each criterion at level A, AA, or AAA.
  • AA is the target almost every law references; AAA is the highest level and is not expected site-wide.
  • 2.2 added 9 criteria — 2.4.11 / 2.4.12 Focus Not Obscured, 2.4.13 Focus Appearance, 2.5.7 Dragging Movements, 2.5.8 Target Size (Minimum), 3.2.6 Consistent Help, 3.3.7 Redundant Entry, and 3.3.8 / 3.3.9 Accessible Authentication — and removed 4.1.1 Parsing.
  • It is the technical foundation almost every accessibility law builds on, directly or via EN 301 549.
  • Conformance is all-or-nothing per level for a full page — every applicable criterion at that level must pass.

WCAG is best learned criterion by criterion, in the context of real markup. These Learn pages each map their fixes back to specific success criteria:

Where this fits

WCAG is the shared technical core that the other standards reference rather than replace. To see how EN 301 549, Section 508, the ADA, and the European Accessibility Act each point back to it, return to the Standards overview.