Understanding WCAG 2.2

What the guidelines actually are

WCAG stands for the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. They are an international standard, published by the World Wide Web Consortium, that describes how to make websites usable by people with a wide range of disabilities: visual, hearing, motor and cognitive. Version 2.2 is the current release, published in 2023.

For a parish or town council the guidelines are not optional. The Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018 require council websites to meet a recognised accessibility standard and to publish an accessibility statement. The current legal baseline is WCAG 2.1 level AA; 2.2 is the up to date version and the direction the rules are moving, so we build every site to 2.2 AA.

The four principles

Everything in WCAG sits under four ideas, often shortened to POUR:

• Perceivable: people can take in the content, whatever sense they are using. Text alternatives for images, captions for video, enough colour contrast.
• Operable: people can use the site with whatever they navigate by. Everything works with a keyboard, nothing depends on a precise gesture, there is enough time to read and act.
• Understandable: the content and the controls behave in predictable ways. Clear language, consistent navigation, helpful error messages on forms.
• Robust: the site works with current and future assistive technology, such as screen readers, because it is built on clean, standard code.

A, AA and AAA

Each guideline has testable success criteria at three levels. Level A is the minimum, AA is the standard almost everyone aims for, and AAA is a higher bar that is not always achievable across a whole site. Public sector websites must meet A and AA. When a supplier says a site is "WCAG 2.2 AA" they mean it meets every A and AA criterion.

What changed in version 2.2

Version 2.2 keeps everything from 2.1 and adds a small number of criteria. In plain terms they ask that:

• the keyboard focus indicator is not hidden behind a sticky header or a cookie banner
• anything you can do by dragging can also be done with a simple tap or click
• buttons and links are big enough to press comfortably on a touchscreen
• help, such as a contact link, appears in the same place on every page
• a form does not ask you to re-enter information you have already given
• signing in does not depend on remembering or copying a complex code

None of these are exotic. They are the sort of thing a well-built modern site does anyway.

What it means for your website day to day

Most accessibility work is ordinary content care:

• every image that carries meaning has a short, accurate text description
• headings are used in order, so the page has a clear structure
• links make sense out of context, not "click here"
• colour is never the only way information is shown
• text can be enlarged without the layout breaking
• videos have captions, and ideally a transcript
• documents you upload, especially PDFs, can be read by a screen reader
• forms have visible labels and clear error messages

Your accessibility statement

Every council website must carry an accessibility statement, written to the government model. It says how accessible the site is, lists anything that is not yet fully compliant, and gives a way to report a problem or ask for a document in another format. It needs reviewing regularly, and whenever the site changes significantly.

Who is responsible for what

We build and maintain the site to WCAG 2.2 AA, and we keep the accessibility statement current. Your council is responsible for the content it adds: writing good alt text, keeping headings tidy, and checking that documents are accessible before they go up. Our training covers exactly this, so it becomes a habit rather than a chore, and the content management system for parish councils keeps new pages in the accessible templates. An accessible website is also one of the things the AGAR question explained in our Assertion 10 guide asks councils to confirm.

See how we test every website for the tools and manual checks we use, read more about your wider duties on the compliance pages, or get in touch if you would like your current site reviewed.

Questions clerks often ask