WCAG 2.2:the nine things that changed, in plain English.

What WCAG actually is

WCAG — the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines — is a set of testable statements about what makes web content usable by people with disabilities. It is published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the same body that maintains the standards behind HTML and CSS. It is not a law. It is the technical checklist that laws around the world borrow when they need to define what "accessible" means, which is why the same document sits behind the ADA in the United States, the European Accessibility Act, and public-sector rules on several continents.

Everything in WCAG hangs off four principles, easiest to remember by their initials, POUR: content must be Perceivable, Operable, Understandable and Robust. Under those sit guidelines, and under the guidelines sit the individual, testable success criteria — the numbered items like "1.4.3 Contrast" that an auditor actually checks against. WCAG 2.2 has 87 of them.

A, AA, AAA — and the only level that matters in practice

Every success criterion carries a conformance level. Level A is the floor — the most essential barriers. Level AA adds the requirements that make a site genuinely usable, and it is the level that virtually every law and contract asks for. Level AAA is the most demanding tier; W3C itself notes it is not recommended as a blanket requirement for whole sites, because some content cannot meet it. When someone says "WCAG compliant" without a level, they almost always mean AA.

WCAG 2.2 at a glance

WCAG 2.2 became a W3C Recommendation on 5 October 2023, and on 21 October 2025 it was approved as an international standard, ISO/IEC 40500:2025 — which makes it easier for more countries to adopt it directly. Set against 2.1, the change is small and additive.

The nine additions were written to close known gaps in three areas: people who navigate by keyboard, people with motor impairments — especially on touchscreens — and people with cognitive and learning disabilities. If your site uses drag-and-drop, sticky headers, small touch targets, CAPTCHAs, or multi-step forms, WCAG 2.2 speaks directly to you.

The nine new success criteria

Each card opens to a plain-language explanation, a real barrier it prevents, the fix, and who on your team owns it. The problem-and-fix examples are drawn from W3C's own persona scenarios. Level is shown on every card — the six A/AA ones are what you focus on for legal conformance; the three AAA ones are worth knowing but rarely required wholesale.

The one thing WCAG 2.2 removed

WCAG 2.2 took away exactly one criterion: 4.1.1 Parsing, which used to require clean, valid HTML — properly nested tags, no duplicate IDs, and so on. It was removed and marked obsolete because modern browsers and assistive technologies now handle imperfect markup consistently through the HTML5 parsing algorithm, so parsing errors and accessibility errors are no longer the same thing. W3C even treats it as "always satisfied" retroactively under 2.0 and 2.1.

Which WCAG version does your law actually reference?

This is where confident marketing gets it wrong most often. The version you must legally meet depends on which regime covers you — and it is usually not 2.2 yet. The good news is that because 2.2 is backwards compatible, building to 2.2 satisfies every one of these at once.

Where to start

You don't need to memorise 87 criteria to make progress. Automated testing reliably detects 30–50% of WCAG 2.2 AA success criteria, instantly — and, helpfully, most of what it catches is the handful of failures that dominate the web: contrast, alt text, form labels, empty links and buttons. Start there, then layer on the WCAG 2.2 additions, then bring in human testing for the flows a machine can't judge.

Common questions