WCAG 2.2, without the jargon

Every few months a new wave of accessibility lawsuits makes the rounds, and every time the same question lands in our inbox: “Which rules do I actually have to follow?” The honest answer is that almost all of them point back to one document — the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG. Here’s what it says, minus the spec-speak.

What WCAG actually is

WCAG is a set of testable success criteria, grouped under four principles: content should be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. Courts and regulators around the world have settled on WCAG 2.2 Level AA as the practical bar. Hit AA and you’ve addressed the vast majority of real-world barriers.

The five that trip everyone up

In tens of thousands of HelpBob scans, the same handful of issues account for most failures. If you fix nothing else, fix these:

• Color contrast (1.4.3). Text needs a 4.5:1 ratio against its background. Light-grey-on-white is the single most common failure on the web.
• Missing alt text (1.1.1). Every meaningful image needs a text alternative; decorative ones need an empty one.
• Keyboard traps & focus (2.1.1, 2.4.7). Everything clickable must work with a keyboard, and the focus ring must be visible.
• Form labels (3.3.2). Inputs need programmatic labels — a placeholder is not a label.
• Link & button names (4.1.2). “Read more” and bare icons leave screen-reader users guessing.

Overlay widgets promise instant compliance, but they fix the symptom in the browser, not the cause in your code. When the lawsuit comes, there’s no paper trail.

The numbers that matter

The risk isn’t theoretical. Digital accessibility claims have climbed every year, and the overwhelming majority cite WCAG failures that are detectable — and fixable — automatically.

What changed in 2.2

Version 2.2 added nine criteria, mostly aimed at people with motor and cognitive disabilities — bigger click targets, visible focus that isn’t obscured, and not forcing users to remember information across steps. None of them are exotic; they’re the kind of thing good design does anyway.

Where to start

Run a scan, fix the top five, and turn on continuous monitoring so regressions don’t creep back in. Accessibility isn’t a one-time project; it’s a property of a site that keeps shipping. The good news is that, done at the source, it stays fixed.