WCAG 2.2 became a W3C Recommendation in October 2023. It adds nine success criteria and removes one, and it is fully backwards compatible: meeting 2.2 means you meet 2.1.
If you are already at 2.1 AA, the delta is small and unusually practical. Most of the new criteria are about dexterity and cognition — the areas 2.0 and 2.1 covered least well.
The new Level A criteria
Two of the three are about not making people repeat themselves, and they land squarely on checkout flows.
- —3.2.6 Consistent Help — help mechanisms stay in the same relative place across pages.
- —3.3.7 Redundant Entry — do not ask for the same information twice in one process.
- —2.4.11 Focus Not Obscured (Minimum) is AA, but its sibling behaviour is what most sticky headers break.
The new Level AA criteria that will cost you work
Three of these show up on almost every site built in the last five years.
- —2.4.11 Focus Not Obscured — a sticky header must not completely hide the focused element. Usually one `scroll-margin-top` away from fixed.
- —2.5.8 Target Size (Minimum) — 24×24 CSS pixels, or adequate spacing. Icon rows and pagination are the common offenders.
- —2.5.7 Dragging Movements — anything draggable needs a non-drag alternative. Kanban boards and sliders.
- —3.3.8 Accessible Authentication (Minimum) — no cognitive function test to log in. Allow paste, support password managers, and reconsider that CAPTCHA.
Why 4.1.1 Parsing was removed
The criterion asked for well-formed markup: no duplicate ids, properly nested elements. It was written when assistive technology parsed HTML itself.
Modern assistive technology reads the browser's accessibility tree, and browsers recover from malformed markup consistently. The criterion had become impossible to fail in a way that harmed anyone, while generating a steady stream of findings nobody could act on. It is marked obsolete in 2.2 and always passes.
Duplicate ids still break `label[for]` and `aria-labelledby`, so tools continue to report them — under 1.3.1 and 4.1.2, where the actual harm is.
Should you target 2.2 now?
For EU compliance the legal target is still WCAG 2.1 AA, because that is what EN 301 549 currently restates. But the new criteria are cheap to meet, they address barriers real users hit daily, and the standard will catch up.
We scan against 2.2 AA by default for exactly that reason: the extra criteria cost almost nothing to satisfy and everything to retrofit later.
Questions
- Is WCAG 2.2 required by the European Accessibility Act?
- Not currently. EN 301 549, the harmonised standard behind the EAA, restates WCAG 2.1 Level A and AA. WCAG 2.2 is backwards compatible, so meeting it also meets the legal target.
- Do we still need to fix duplicate ids now that 4.1.1 is gone?
- Yes. Duplicate ids break label associations and ARIA references, which fails 1.3.1 and 4.1.2. What changed is the criterion the finding is filed under, not whether it matters.
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