October 10, 2023 · reala11y team

WCAG 2.2 is here: the nine new criteria, explained

Blog post written, fact-checked against the site's published WCAG 2.2 guide, and passed through the legal-safe-language review.

WordPress made WCAG 2.1 the de facto baseline years ago. As of October 2023, that baseline moved: WCAG 2.2 became the current W3C Recommendation, and it is the version most procurement checklists now point at — the same direction the EU’s European Accessibility Act (enforceable 28 June 2025) and the US DOJ’s April 2024 ADA Title II web rule are pulling. If you build or run WordPress sites, it is worth knowing exactly what changed.

The short version: WCAG 2.2 keeps everything in 2.1, adds nine new success criteria, and removes one old one (4.1.1 Parsing). Our full breakdown of every A and AA criterion lives in the WCAG 2.2 guide; this post is the practical tour of what’s new.

”Nine new criteria” — but six things to actually learn

The nine additions resolve into six features. The count reaches nine because two of them ship in pairs: a Level AA “minimum” and a Level AAA “enhanced” version.

1. Focus Not Obscured — 2.4.11 (AA), 2.4.12 (AAA)

When a keyboard user tabs to an element, it must not be entirely hidden behind a sticky header, cookie banner, or chat widget. This is the criterion sticky-everything WordPress themes trip over most. Test it yourself: tab through a page with a sticky header and watch whether the focused link vanishes underneath it.

2. Target Size (Minimum) — 2.5.8 (AA)

Interactive targets — links, buttons, icons — should be at least 24×24 CSS pixels, or have enough spacing around them. Tightly packed social icons and tiny × close buttons are the usual offenders.

3. Dragging Movements — 2.5.7 (AA)

Anything operated by dragging (sliders, drag-to-reorder lists, map panning) needs a single-pointer alternative: a tap, a click, an arrow button. Drag-and-drop is fine — drag-and-drop as the only way is not.

4. Consistent Help — 3.2.6 (A)

If you offer a help mechanism (contact link, support chat, phone number), it should sit in a consistent relative location across pages. In WordPress terms: put it in the header or footer template, not scattered per page.

5. Redundant Entry — 3.3.7 (A)

Do not make people re-enter information they already provided in the same process. Think checkout flows where billing equals shipping, or multi-step forms that forget what you typed two screens ago.

6. Accessible Authentication — 3.3.8 (AA), 3.3.9 (AAA)

Logging in must not depend on a cognitive function test — memorising a password unaided, solving a puzzle, transcribing distorted characters — unless an alternative exists. The AA version allows common exceptions (object recognition, entering your own info); the AAA version is stricter.

The one removal: 4.1.1 Parsing

WCAG 2.2 retires 4.1.1 Parsing. It originally required valid markup so that early assistive technology could parse HTML directly. Modern browsers build the accessibility tree with robust, error-correcting parsers, so the specific failures 4.1.1 described no longer cause real barriers — anything that still matters is covered by 1.3.1 and 4.1.2.

This is why the count looks slightly awkward: WCAG 2.2 has 87 numbered criteria but 86 testable ones once 4.1.1 is set aside. Duplicate id attributes are still worth fixing as a code-quality issue — just not as a conformance failure.

What this means for a WordPress site

Some of these are detectable in code, and some are not:

• Measurable now: Target Size is a pixel check. Duplicate IDs are findable. reala11y flags both today.
• Needs a human: whether your help link sits consistently, whether your slider offers a button alternative, whether a focused element clears your sticky header — these call for judgment.

That split is the honest reality of automated accessibility tooling: it detects roughly 30–40% of WCAG issues by criteria, and the rest is manual review. reala11y is built to fix the code-level issues at the source rather than paint over them with an overlay script, and to leave the human-judgment criteria clearly marked as human-judgment criteria.

Takeaway

WCAG 2.2 is not a dramatic rewrite of 2.1 — it is a focused set of additions aimed at keyboard users, touch users, people with motor differences, and people carrying cognitive load through forms and logins. None of it makes a site conformant on its own, and no tool can promise that. But knowing the nine criteria tells you where to look, and that is where remediation actually starts.