WCAG Compliance vs. Real Accessibility: What Organizations Get Wrong

The Web Accessibility Content Guidelines (WCAG) were developed to help organizations make online content accessible for people with disabilities. But is WCAG enough?

While extremely important, compliance or conformance with WCAG isn’t necessarily an indicator of true accessibility for a given digital product like a website or mobile app. In many ways, WCAG is a baseline. Organizations can do much more to provide a truly effective online experience for people with disabilities.

What is WCAG?

The Web Accessibility Content Guidelines (WCAG) are created and maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. WCAG’s goal is to help people make web content more accessible to people with disabilities.

The first version of WCAG was published in 1999, and since then, it has been updated several times. The current standard is WCAG 2.2, implemented in 2023. WCAG 3 is currently in development.

WCAG is a standard rather than legislation; this means that there are no regulatory bodies that govern its implementation, and organizations are free to adopt as many or as few recommendations as they wish. However, for many organizations, WCAG conformance may effectively be required in law, as WCAG is cited in some digital accessibility laws, such as the U.S. Americans with Disabilities Act Title II and Ontario’s Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA). WCAG conformance can be evidence of compliance with other laws, such as the European Accessibility Act (EAA). Evidence of WCAG nonconformance is regularly used in lawsuits against organizations with websites providing services where an allegation is made of discrimination on the basis of disability. Increasingly, WCAG conformance might also be a contractual requirement for a vendor providing a digital product to a customer, especially if the customer operates in a regulated sector.

Compliance with WCAG is a critical first step in a strategy to reduce legal risk, but to ensure digital products are usable and useful to people with disabilities, accessibility must go beyond the WCAG compliance checklist.

Is WCAG enough?

While WCAG is a fundamental accessibility standard, conformance doesn’t always equate to an excellent user experience for people with disabilities.

Take the example of a wheelchair ramp that meets all the technical specifications required under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Accessibility Standards-the correct gradient, the right width-but ends right in front of a telephone pole. If the telephone pole isn’t on your property, you might be compliant, but your ramp doesn’t make your building wheelchair accessible.

WCAG is the digital equivalent of this. Your digital product can be technically compliant and still not be usable for its intended purpose. For example, say you developed a form to support new customers signing up for an account. You might have followed WCAG requirements for labeling input fields, keyboard operation, and providing error messages that describe an input error and how to fix it. But if that form requires users to select their country from an alphabetically-ordered menu of 200 options with no option to type in the country name, or uses a slider widget for collecting a user’s year of birth that requires fine dexterity to operate, or requires a phone number without an option for Deaf users to specify an alternative communication method, then the form won’t be usable by all disabled people.

In both cases, simply meeting a standard isn’t enough; an organization also must take user experience into account.

User experience in accessibility

When you’re designing an online experience to be accessible, WCAG conformance isn’t the only thing to consider. It’s also critical to consider the end user. What can be done to make their interactions with your content more efficient, effective, and stress-free, or even enjoyable?

However, this can be a challenge, especially if a design team doesn’t have experience designing for disabilities. Web developers can learn WCAG’s conformance requirements, but it’s much more difficult to understand whether a site or application is functionally usable by people with disabilities.

Helpfully, WCAG provides guidance to product teams. Stepping back from the conformance level of WCAG (the success criteria), the thirteen Guidelines that make up WCAG provide a very useful set of higher-level guidance on accessible user experience design that product teams can apply when making design decisions for products across different technologies, usage contexts, and target audiences.

Even when following WCAG’s guidelines, product teams may still be unsure about whether they’re making decisions that improve, rather than degrade, the user experience for people with disabilities. That’s why it can be helpful to consult with an organization that understands both the standards and user needs.

For example, Vispero’s team is able to test your website against WCAG, as well as the overall functionality and usability of your site. Our screen reading software, JAWS, is designed so that someone who is blind can independently navigate and interact with the digital world. Our team uses JAWS to evaluate the user experience for users with visual impairments: Does it all work together to create an accessible and usable experience?

WCAG is a stepping stone for inclusive user experiences

It’s tempting to think of WCAG as a “versus” narrative: compliance versus experience, for example. It’s not entirely accurate, however. WCAG is a baseline from which a strong, accessible user experience can be built.

It’s all in an organization’s approach to accessibility. If an organization’s accessibility efforts are concerned only with compliance and checking boxes and only think of accessibility and the needs of people with disabilities later in the development lifecycle, meeting WCAG requirements is unlikely to yield a well-thought-out accessible experience.

However, if an organization is also thinking about and accommodating diverse user needs early and throughout the design and development process, the result is more likely to be an experience that is usable and useful for as many users as possible, including people with disabilities. That’s true accessibility. Vispero helps teams create intuitive, inclusive digital experiences. Our experts bring accessibility into UX strategy, user testing, and design, so every interaction works beautifully for every user. Book your consultation today.