WCAG 2.2

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 are the internationally recognised technical guidelines for making web and digital content accessible to people with disabilities. They are published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) through its Accessibility Guidelines Working Group under the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). WCAG 2.2 first became a W3C Recommendation — the W3C's highest maturity level, signalling a stable, endorsed standard — on 5 October 2023, and was re-published as an updated Recommendation on 12 December 2024 to incorporate editorial and errata corrections.

WCAG is organised around four foundational principles: content must be Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust (POUR). Beneath these sit guidelines, and beneath those sit testable success criteria, each assigned a conformance level: A (minimum), AA (the level most commonly cited by law and policy), and AAA (enhanced). WCAG 2.2 builds on 2.1 and 2.0 and is backward compatible. Version 2.2 added nine new success criteria addressing barriers not fully covered before — including focus appearance, minimum target sizes for pointer inputs, dragging-movement alternatives, consistent help placement, redundant-entry avoidance, and accessible authentication that does not rely on cognitive-function tests. It also removed the former success criterion 4.1.1 Parsing, which had become obsolete.

Although WCAG was written primarily for web content expressed in technologies like HTML, its principles and many of its success criteria apply directly to electronic documents, including PDF. The W3C publishes format-specific PDF techniques showing how to satisfy particular success criteria within a PDF file. This is why WCAG matters for document accessibility: it defines the outcome-based, user-centred expectations — text alternatives, meaningful sequence, sufficient colour contrast, keyboard operability, clear language — that a PDF must ultimately deliver to a person using assistive technology. WCAG is deliberately technology-agnostic and outcome-focused: it describes what users must be able to perceive and do, rather than prescribing the precise internal file mechanics, which is where format-specific standards like PDF/UA complement it.