WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines)

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are a W3C Web Accessibility Initiative technical standard for making web content more accessible to people with disabilities. The current WCAG 2.2 Recommendation organizes guidance under four principles—perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust—and provides testable success criteria at Levels A, AA, and AAA. Level AA conformance requires every applicable Level A and Level AA criterion to be met for each full page in scope, not an average score.

Why it matters: Define the version, target level, pages, states, technologies, and jurisdiction or contract before claiming compliance. Build accessibility into design, content, code, procurement, and release criteria; evaluate representative templates and complete tasks across responsive views, keyboard use, zoom and reflow, forms and errors, media, motion, timing, focus, names and roles, status messages, and relevant assistive technologies. Automated tools can find some failures but cannot establish conformance or usability alone, so combine them with expert review and testing by people with disabilities. Fix recurring component and authoring causes, retest affected journeys, and monitor regressions. WCAG itself is a standard, not universal legal advice: laws and adopted versions differ by place and context. A conformance claim also requires full-page and process scope, including third-party content where applicable.