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3 October 2026

What WCAG 2.2 means for your business website

“Accessibility rules are for the council, surely?” Run a four-person accountancy practice and that’s a fair thing to think. Partly, it’s right. The UK’s specific website accessibility regulations are aimed at public sector bodies. But your clients don’t stop being disabled because you’re a private firm, and the Equality Act still applies to you. WCAG 2.2 is the standard yardstick for judging whether a site works for everyone. You can check a lot of it yourself in an afternoon.

In brief

WCAG 2.2 is the current W3C standard. Level AA is the sensible target for almost any business.
Most private businesses aren’t covered by the public sector website rules. The Equality Act duty to make reasonable adjustments still applies to them.
A keyboard, your browser’s zoom and a free contrast checker will catch a lot.
Automated scanners help, but they can’t sign a site off.

What WCAG 2.2 actually is

WCAG stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. They come from the W3C, the body behind many of the web’s core standards, and version 2.2 became an official W3C Recommendation on 5 October 2023. The current edition is dated December 2024. It’s a long list of success criteria, each one a test you pass or fail, like whether the text still works when it’s blown up to 200 percent.

Every criterion sits at one of three levels. A is the floor. AA covers everything at A plus a second layer, and it’s the level UK public bodies are asked to meet. AAA is the strictest, and the W3C itself doesn’t recommend requiring it across a whole site, because some content simply can’t meet every AAA criterion. So aim for AA.

Already built to WCAG 2.1? You’re most of the way there. The W3C says the 2.0 and 2.1 criteria are essentially the same in 2.2, with one exception. An old rule about parsing code has gone, marked as obsolete.

Does the law require it for a private business?

Treat this section as general information. It isn’t legal advice.

Public sector bodies have their own regulations, from 2018. Unless they’re exempt, they have to meet WCAG 2.2 AA and publish an accessibility statement. A private plumbing firm or an online gift shop isn’t caught by those.

The Equality Act 2010 is another matter. Anyone providing a service to the public, paid or free, has a duty to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people. The Act’s explanatory notes call it an anticipatory duty, which means thinking about disabled customers’ needs in advance. Waiting for a complaint isn’t the idea. GOV.UK’s guidance for public sector sites puts it bluntly. “All UK service providers have a legal obligation to make reasonable adjustments”, under the Equality Act or, in Northern Ireland, the Disability Discrimination Act 1995.

Neither law names WCAG for private businesses, and what counts as reasonable depends on your circumstances. If you’ve got a specific worry, speak to a solicitor. As a working benchmark, though, WCAG 2.2 AA is the most widely used standard.

The numbers aren’t small either. The government’s Family Resources Survey for 2024 to 2025 counted 16.7 million disabled people in the UK, a quarter of the population. Not every disability affects how someone uses a website, but that’s a lot of people to make life awkward for.

What’s new in 2.2 that business sites trip over

WCAG 2.2 added nine criteria. Six sit at level A or AA, and a few catch ordinary business sites out.

Focus that gets hidden

When someone moves through a page with the Tab key, the thing they’ve landed on mustn’t be completely hidden by content you’ve added. The W3C’s own examples include sticky headers and footers, non-modal pop-ups and cookie banners. That cookie bar pinned to the bottom of the screen? If it completely covers the button someone’s just tabbed to, it fails.

Buttons too small to hit

Anything people tap or click should be at least 24 by 24 CSS pixels. There are exceptions, for example when a small target has enough space around it or it’s a link sitting inside a sentence. Tiny social icons crammed together in a footer are a classic miss.

Dragging, logging in and repeating yourself

If something only works by dragging, like a price slider on a shop’s product filter or a map pin on a removals firm’s quote form, there has to be a simple alternative such as tapping or clicking. Logging in shouldn’t depend on remembering, transcribing or solving something unless there’s another way through. In practice that means letting password managers fill the box and letting people paste in a code. Retailers with customer accounts should look hard at this one, and so should membership sites with puzzle-style CAPTCHAs. The pick-the-buses kind of image test is allowed at AA, mind.

Two smaller ones sit at level A. If you show a phone number, chat link or contact page across several pages, keep it in the same relative place on each. And don’t make someone type their address twice in the same process when you could fill it in for them or let them pick it.

Checks you can do yourself this week

None of these need special software. The W3C publishes its own set of ‘Easy Checks’ along similar lines, and it’s careful to say they’re a first look. A page can seem to pass and still have serious barriers.

Put the mouse in a drawer. Click into the address bar and press Tab, over and over, through your home page and your contact form. Can you always see where you are? Can you reach every menu item and send the form? If the focus vanishes behind a banner or gets stuck in a pop-up, you’ve found a problem.

Now zoom. At 200 percent the text should still be readable with nothing cut off. Push a normal desktop window to 400 percent and the content should reflow to fit, so nobody has to scroll sideways to read a line. Maps and data tables are allowed to scroll. A guest house whose booking widget spills off the edge of the screen at that size has a job for its developer.

Check the contrast. Normal text needs a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 against its background. Large text needs 3 to 1. Pale grey on white is the usual offender, with white text over a busy photo close behind.

Look at your images. Anything that carries meaning needs ‘alt text’ describing what’s in it, and purely decorative images should be set up so screen readers can skip them. A charity’s photo of volunteers packing food parcels needs a description. A swirly background graphic doesn’t.

Then the forms, links and video. Every form field needs a label or instructions. Links should make sense from their wording, or the sentence around them, so a page full of ‘click here’ tells nobody much. Pre-recorded video with sound needs captions, and that’s a level A requirement, so a training provider’s course trailers or a builder’s project films should have them. Every page needs a title that describes its topic or purpose too, which also helps in search, as our piece on how Google treats your page titles explains.

Where automated tools help, and where they stop

Free scanners, and the accessibility audit built into Chrome’s Lighthouse, will quickly flag things like missing alt text, poor contrast and form fields without labels. Run one. Don’t treat a good score as a pass, though. The W3C puts it plainly, saying tools “can not determine accessibility, they can only assist in doing so” and that human judgement is still required. A scanner can see that an image has alt text. Whether that text makes any sense is another question.

Building it in costs less than bolting it on

Colours, font sizes, button sizes, how forms behave and where the help lives all get decided early in a project. Change them after launch and you can end up redoing templates you’ve already paid for. So put WCAG 2.2 AA in your website brief as a requirement, and ask anyone quoting how they’ll test for it. Our guide to planning a business website shows where accessibility fits alongside structure, content and choosing a platform. Still torn on that last one? Our comparison of WordPress, Wix and Squarespace covers what each lets you change later.

Plenty of the fixes help everybody. Bigger tap targets, clear labels and readable text make a site easier to use on a phone in bright sunlight. That overlaps heavily with the user experience basics we covered for 2026, and with conversion rate optimisation, since a form people can actually finish is a form that sends you enquiries. Whether those messages then reach your inbox is a separate job, and it’s covered in our piece on making website forms work properly.

Getting your site checked

Not sure where yours stands? Try the keyboard and zoom tests first. If they turn up more than a couple of problems, or a rebuild’s on the cards anyway, accessibility is part of how we approach website design for businesses from the start. Talk to us and we’ll go through what we find in plain English.

Keep reading

Sources

Scott Woodfield

Founder of TWA, Scott harbours over 10 years of digital marketing agency experience. Everything from removing a background of an image to full blown ecommerce solutions from the ground up, Scott's your go to guy for anything marketing & web.

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