How to Scan a Website for WCAG 2.2 (and What 2.2 Actually Adds)
WCAG 2.2 became a W3C Recommendation in October 2023. Nearly three years on, most scanners still default to 2.1 — and the difference is not academic if your procurement paperwork asks for the current standard.
What 2.2 adds
Nine success criteria, and one removal. The removal is 4.1.1 Parsing, which was obsolete: browsers recover from duplicate IDs and unclosed tags so reliably that failing a page for it told you nothing about whether anyone could use it.
Of the nine additions, most are about people who do not use a mouse precisely, or at all. Focus Not Obscured means a sticky header must not hide the thing you just tabbed to. Dragging Movements means anything you can drag must also work without dragging. Target Size (Minimum) sets 24 by 24 CSS pixels as the floor for a control.
Consistent Help and Redundant Entry are the quiet ones. Help should be in the same place on every page, and you should not be asked for the same information twice in one process. Both are ordinary good design that happens to matter enormously if remembering things is difficult for you.
Which parts a machine can check
Honestly? One of them, reliably. Target Size is geometry: an element is 24 by 24 or it is not, and axe-core checks it directly.
Focus Not Obscured needs a machine to tab through the page and watch what happens, which is possible but not what a static rule does. Dragging Movements needs somebody to know that the carousel has a drag handler and no button alternative. Consistent Help needs a view across pages, not one page.
This is the uncomfortable shape of accessibility testing generally, and 2.2 makes it sharper: the newest criteria are the ones automation is worst at, because they are about interaction rather than markup.
What we changed
We shipped axe-core 4.11, which has had WCAG 2.2 rules in it the whole time, and never exposed them. Our own scanner could not check the standard our own blog post explained. That is fixed: WCAG 2.2 AA is now a standard you can pick on the scanner, and it runs everything in 2.1 AA plus the 2.2 additions that are machine-decidable.
The irony is that the one rule 2.2 adds automatically — target size — caught a 24-pixel menu button on our own site the day we turned it on.
Scan a page against WCAG 2.2 AA
Free, and it tells you what it could not check as well as what it could.
Scan a page against WCAG 2.2 AA →