WCAG 2.2 is Finally Here!

On 5 October 2023, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) made the following announcement:

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 is a W3C Recommendation

The Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AG WG) published Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 as a W3C Recommendation. WCAG and supporting documents explain how to make content more accessible to people with disabilities. For an introduction to WCAG, see the WCAG 2 Overview. WCAG 2.2 adds 9 requirements (called success criteria) since WCAG 2.1. These success criteria improve accessibility for people with visual, physical, and cognitive disabilities. For example, they expand guidance for touch input. To learn more about WCAG 2.2, see What’s New in WCAG 2.2.

This means the latest amendments to WCAG are now fully in effect, and all of us in the digital accessibility industry can adopt version 2.2 as our operating guidelines.

The ARC platform used by our customers is now in the process of being updated to reflect WCAG 2.2, and our subscribers will shortly see these changes.

For guidance on how to meet the new criteria as an author or designer, our article New Success Criteria in WCAG 2.2 has a lot of useful information. For those seeking an explanation of what has changed and how to test and audit content against WCAG 2.2, we’re happy to say that the video of the webinar our ARC Consultant James Edwards presented on the topic last month is freely available to everyone via YouTube.

James’ webinar has won plaudits from a range of industry experts as one of the best explanations available of the changes to WCAG and how they will affect conformance testing. We encourage you to watch the video and we’d be glad to handle any queries you may have that come out of it.

TPGi would like to express its appreciation for the hard work put in by the AGWG (including members of the working group from TPGi) to bring us to this point, and we look forward to working together to implement WCAG 2.2 and make the web more accessible.

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About Ricky Onsman

Veteran Australian web designer, front end developer, writer and editor. As a writer and/or editor, I've worked with the likes of UX Australia, SitePoint, Web Directions and Smashing Magazine. As a freelance designer and front end dev, I focused on building accessible websites, then worked with a number of design, UX and accessibility-focused companies in Australia, North America and Europe before joining the Knowledge Center team at TPGi.