Website accessibility checklist: what WCAG 2.2 AA asks of a marketing site

Most company websites fail basic accessibility checks, and most of the failures are small: grey text that is too faint, an icon button with no name, a form field with no label. This website accessibility checklist covers what WCAG 2.2 Level AA asks of a marketing site, which parts of it the law now expects, and the order we fix things in when we audit or rebuild brand websites. None of it needs a redesign. Most of it needs care, and a habit of checking.

01What accessible means for a website

"Accessible" has a working definition: the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2, published by the W3C. They are organised as success criteria at three levels, A, AA and AAA. Level AA is the one regulators, procurement teams and accessibility statements refer to, so it is the target for a company site.

The criteria are written to be testable. "Text has a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1" is either true or not. That makes accessibility less of a matter of opinion than people expect, and it means a checklist genuinely helps.

02Who has to make their website accessible

In the EU, the European Accessibility Act covers a set of consumer products and services, including e-commerce. The Commission confirmed it entered into application on 28 June 2025. If you sell to consumers in the EU through a website or app, assume it applies to you. Each member state writes the Act into its own law, so ask your counsel how it applies to your business.

Outside that scope, the case is still strong. Public sector buyers and large companies increasingly ask for an accessibility statement in procurement, and a site that works with a keyboard and a screen reader also works better on a phone in bright sunlight.

03The failures found on most websites

WebAIM tests the home pages of the top million websites every year. In its 2026 report, 95.9% of home pages had detectable WCAG failures, with an average of 56.1 errors per page. Six types of error account for most of them:

Every one of these is cheap to fix and easy to prevent. That is where to start.

04The website accessibility checklist

Work through it page type by page type: the home page, a service page, an article, the contact page and the navigation. Fix a pattern once in the component and every page that uses it is fixed.

Content

• Every page has one H1, and headings follow in order without skipping levels
• Every meaningful image has alt text that says what the image tells you; decorative images have empty alt
• Link text makes sense on its own: "Read the migration checklist", not "Click here"
• The page language is set in the HTML, and any passage in another language is marked
• Video has captions, and audio has a transcript

Design

• Body text meets 4.5:1 contrast against its background, and large text meets 3:1
• Buttons, form borders, focus rings and icons meet 3:1 against what surrounds them
• Colour is never the only signal: errors also have text, and links in body copy are underlined
• Text can be zoomed to 200% without content being cut off or overlapping
• Motion can be paused, and the site respects the reduced motion setting

Keyboard and interaction

• Every link, button, menu and form can be reached and used with the Tab, Enter, Space and arrow keys
• The focused element always has a visible focus style, and is never hidden behind a sticky header or cookie banner
• Menus, dialogs and accordions announce their state to screen readers and return focus when they close
• Click and tap targets are at least 24 by 24 CSS pixels, or have that much space around them
• Nothing depends on dragging, hovering or a precise gesture alone

Forms

• Every field has a visible label tied to it in the code, not just placeholder text
• Required fields and formats are stated before someone submits
• Errors say what went wrong and how to fix it, next to the field, and are announced
• The form does not ask for information it already has
• Any spam check offers a way through that does not rely on solving a puzzle

05What WCAG 2.2 added

WCAG 2.2 became a W3C Recommendation in October 2023 and added nine success criteria. Six of them are at A or AA, so they belong on a company site's checklist:

1. Focus Not Obscured (Minimum), AA: the focused element must not be completely hidden by something the site put on top, such as a sticky header or a chat widget.
2. Dragging Movements, AA: anything done by dragging, like a slider, also needs a single tap or click way to do it.
3. Target Size (Minimum), AA: targets need to be at least 24 by 24 CSS pixels, with exceptions for links inside sentences and enough spacing.
4. Consistent Help, A: if help such as contact details or a chat link appears on several pages, it stays in the same place.
5. Redundant Entry, A: a multi step form does not make people type the same thing twice.
6. Accessible Authentication (Minimum), AA: logging in does not require remembering or transcribing something, such as a puzzle, unless there is an alternative. Allowing password managers to paste counts.

It also removed 4.1.1 Parsing, which modern browsers made obsolete.

06How to run an accessibility audit

Automated tools are the right first pass. They find missing alt attributes, contrast failures, empty buttons and missing labels in minutes, which covers most of the table above. They cannot tell whether alt text is accurate, whether the focus order makes sense, or whether a screen reader user can actually complete the contact form.

So an audit has two halves:

1. Automated scan of each page template, fixed at the component level.
2. Manual pass of the key journeys: navigate the whole site with only a keyboard, then complete the main task with a screen reader (VoiceOver on a Mac or iPhone, NVDA on Windows). Zoom to 200%. Turn on reduced motion.

Write down what you found, what you fixed and what is still open. That record becomes your accessibility statement.

07Build it in, so it stays fixed

Accessibility decays like everything else on a website. A new campaign page brings a low contrast button back, an editor uploads images without alt text. The fix is to put the rules where the work happens.

That means contrast-checked colour pairs in the design tokens, focus styles and target sizes built into the shared components, required alt text fields in the CMS, and a keyboard check in every release. It is the same argument we make in our piece on design systems versus style guides: rules that live only in a document drift, rules built into the parts hold. Motion needs the same treatment, as we cover in animation that stays fast.

If you want a second pair of eyes on your site, send us the URL and tell us which journeys matter most.