WCAG 2.2, POUR and the Law

“Is it accessible?” is a question with no answer until you agree on what accessible means. For web content, the agreed answer is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), published by the W3C. Laws in Europe, the US and many other countries point to it, and audit reports are written in its language. You don’t need to memorise it, but you do need to read it fluently.

How WCAG is organised

WCAG has four layers, from broad to testable:

1. Four principles, remembered as POUR. Content must be Perceivable (users can sense it), Operable (users can work the controls), Understandable (users can make sense of it and predict it), and Robust (it works with current and future assistive technology).
2. 13 guidelines under those principles, such as 1.1 Text Alternatives or 2.1 Keyboard Accessible.
3. Success criteria under each guideline: the testable rules. Each has a number, a name and a level: A, AA or AAA. For example, “1.4.3 Contrast (Minimum), AA”.
4. Understanding documents and techniques that explain intent and show known ways to pass or fail.

Conformance is claimed at a level, and each level includes the ones below it. Level AA is the target used by nearly every law and company policy, and it is the target for Ticketly. W3C itself advises against requiring AAA for whole sites, because some AAA criteria can’t be met for all kinds of content.

What changed in 2.2

WCAG 2.0 came out in 2008, 2.1 in 2018 and 2.2 in October 2023. Each version is backwards compatible: a page that meets 2.2 also meets 2.1 and 2.0. Version 2.2 removed one criterion, 4.1.1 Parsing, because modern browsers handle broken markup consistently. It added nine. Six are at level A or AA, and every one of them catches a real Ticketly bug:

Target size deserves a closer look because it is easy to measure. A pointer target must be at least 24 by 24 CSS pixels, unless it has enough spacing (a 24 px circle centred on it doesn’t overlap another target), an equivalent control elsewhere meets the size, it sits inline in a sentence, its size is set by the browser, or that exact presentation is essential (a legally required form, say). Making Ticketly’s quantity buttons 24 px squares, or spacing them apart, fixes it:

.qty button {
  min-inline-size: 24px;
  min-block-size: 24px;
}

Accessible authentication is the one that surprises teams. It says login can’t depend on a “cognitive function test”, such as remembering a password or transcribing a code, unless there is an alternative or a mechanism to help. Allowing paste and autofill so password managers work is usually enough. Blocking paste on a password field fails it.

The law, briefly

This is the landscape in 2026, not legal advice; check with your own counsel for specifics.

• European Union. The European Accessibility Act (Directive 2019/882) has applied since 28 June 2025. It covers products and services such as e-commerce, banking, e-books, transport ticketing and electronic communications, so a site like Ticketly selling to EU customers is in scope. Microenterprises providing services (fewer than 10 staff and no more than 2 million euros turnover) are exempt. The reference standard, EN 301 549 v3.2.1, maps to WCAG 2.1 AA for web content; version 4.1.1, published in September 2026, moves to WCAG 2.2 AA and becomes the reference once the EU cites it in its Official Journal. The older Web Accessibility Directive already required the same of public-sector sites.
• United States. Title III of the ADA covers businesses open to the public; it names no technical standard, but courts and settlements use WCAG AA, and thousands of web accessibility lawsuits are filed each year. A 2024 Department of Justice rule requires state and local governments to meet WCAG 2.1 AA; an April 2026 interim rule moved the deadlines to April 2027 for entities serving 50,000 people or more and April 2028 for smaller ones. Federal agencies follow Section 508, which references WCAG 2.0 AA.
• Elsewhere. Canada, the UK, Israel, Australia and others reference WCAG 2.0, 2.1 or 2.2 at level AA.

The practical conclusion is simple: build to WCAG 2.2 AA and you meet every one of these, because 2.2 includes everything in 2.1 and 2.0. WCAG 3.0 is in development as a W3C working draft with a different scoring model; it isn’t a standard yet, and nothing in law requires it.

Now that you can read the rulebook, Section 2 starts the actual repair work on Ticketly, beginning with the skeleton of the page: landmarks and headings.