WCAG: what the standard asks for, and what a small site actually has to do

WCAG — the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines — is the international standard describing how to make web content usable by people with disabilities. It is published by the W3C, comes in versions (2.0, 2.1, 2.2) and in three conformance levels (A, AA, AAA), and it is referenced by law in many countries, which is usually how a small business first hears about it.

It is also long enough to be genuinely off-putting, and that length is why so many small sites do nothing. The useful thing to know is that a short list of failures accounts for most of the actual barriers people meet, and that fixing those does not need a consultant.

The structure, briefly

• Four principles: content must be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. Everything else hangs off these.
• Three levels: A is the minimum, AA is what legislation typically references, AAA is aspirational and not expected for a whole site.
• Versions build on each other. 2.2 adds criteria to 2.1, which added to 2.0 — meeting the newest generally means meeting the older ones.
• AA is the practical target. If someone tells you your site must be compliant, they almost always mean WCAG 2.1 or 2.2 at level AA.

The failures that actually matter

1. Colour contrast below the required ratio. This is the single most common failure on small business sites, usually light grey text chosen for looks, and it is fixed by changing a colour.
2. Images without meaningful descriptions, covered in alt text.
3. Form fields without labels — a placeholder is not a label, and it vanishes the moment someone types.
4. Content unreachable by keyboard: menus that only open on hover, buttons that are actually unlabelled div elements, focus that disappears into a hidden element.
5. No visible focus indicator, because someone removed the outline for aesthetic reasons.
6. Headings used for size rather than structure, which turns a page into an unnavigable wall for anyone browsing by heading.
7. Video without captions, and audio without a transcript.

The fastest honest test costs nothing and takes ten minutes: unplug the mouse and try to complete your main task using only the keyboard. Every menu, form and button. Most sites fail within the first minute, and what you find that way is more useful than any automated report — scanners catch roughly a third of real issues and cheerfully pass pages that are impossible to use.

Automated tools and their limits

Scanners are worth running and worth distrusting. They reliably catch contrast ratios, missing alt attributes and unlabelled fields, which is genuinely useful. They cannot tell whether your alt text describes the right thing, whether the keyboard order makes sense, or whether a screen reader announces your custom dropdown as anything at all. A clean scan is not compliance, and a site can pass every automated check while being unusable. Be especially wary of overlay widgets that promise compliance from one line of script: accessibility practitioners and several regulators have been consistently critical of them, and they have featured in litigation rather than preventing it.

The legal position, without pretending to be your lawyer

Many jurisdictions reference WCAG in legislation covering public bodies and, increasingly, private businesses — the European Accessibility Act, national implementations across the EU, and equivalents elsewhere. What applies to you depends on where you operate, what you sell and how large you are, and the direction of travel is towards more coverage rather than less. That is a question for someone qualified in your jurisdiction; what is safe to say is that the fixes above are worth doing regardless of whether anyone is compelling you.

Where Ettex fits

Ettex Sites gives you the parts this list touches — colour choices you set, real headings, labelled form fields, keyboard-reachable navigation, alt text prompts on images — and the statement you publish afterwards is covered in accessibility statement.

To be direct: we do not certify anything, do not audit your site, and do not ship an accessibility overlay. A builder can make the right thing easy and cannot stop you choosing grey text on a white background or removing a focus outline. The ten-minute keyboard test remains yours to run.