Written by Stephen Polacek
Our work in the IT Access Initiative is centered on complying with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Maryland’s own Non Visual Access Clause and the federal Section 508 guidelines both use WCAG 2.0 as their baseline. There’s been a lot of discussion around moving up to 2.1 standards to incorporate mobile access, but with 2.2 around the corner, it may be better to wait and look at what these new standards have to offer.
WCAG 2.2 expands on the same goals as 2.1: providing better accessibility on mobile devices and increased accessibility for those with cognitive disabilities. It also keeps the older standards numbers; there’s no moving around of existing guidelines. This means there is no grouping by the subset level (A, AA, AAA) but that should be easy enough to remember. What WCAG 2.2 (found here) does offer is more guidance on physical interactions, such as dragging or touch targets and newer trends like two-step authentication.
For those asking about WCAG 3.0, W3C states in the draft that 3.0 will be an incorporation of the WCAG, Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG), and User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAA). This means 3.0 will have different testing requirements and a different compliance level determination. The current working draft also states that 3.0 is not backward-compatible with WCAG 2.X. Depending on what 3.0 looks like closer to its final publishing, the existing laws based on WCAG 2.X may need to be rewritten.
When considering these 2.2 updates, it’s worth considering skipping 2.1 and going straight to 2.2 compliance.
