WCAG 2.1 AA Standards

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Conformance Levels

Serving content to diverse audiences

Double-A website conformance means a team has invested time and energy into upgrading their website. With affordances such as strong color contrast, video caption considerations, and robust integration with assistive technology, many organizations find double-a conformance to be a good balance between serving a wide range of users with a reasonable budget.

Double-A Overview

Media

  • Captions are present on live video.
  • When appropriate, there exists audio description of what’s happening on streaming media.

Markup

  • The user must be able to resize text without breaking layout.
  • No images of text containing any more than incidental content (so no text banners).
  • The language is declared in the head of the document.

Design

  • There exists a minimum contrast of 4.5:1 among elements. 
  • Heading tags (h1, h2, h3, etc.) are present and emerge from content organically.
  • When an intractable element is present it receives a focus state when tabbing to access.
  • UI elements common on the site have a unifying design.

Forms

  • If an error is present on a form, the website will: suggest ways to fix it, the user may withdraw and resubmit the form, or the form prompts a confirmation.

Navigation

  • Pages can’t be nested or unintentionally obfuscated unless part of a step-by-step process, such as an application or feed result.
  • Navigation follows a semantic structure and is repeated on pages.

Success Criterion