A notion that I always hear and have heard for a long time is that meeting the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) feels like not doing enough for accessibility¹ . And that’s true from a certain view. The goal of WCAG is not to create super accessible sites, it’s to ensure basic accessibility for a wide range of users.

First, as Adrian Roselli writes, You Can’t Make Something Accessible to Everyone. The search for a solution that is accessible to everyone and having no drawbacks for anyone is futile. You are fighting against windmills. Accessibility is always about making compromises and finding the compromises with the fewest drawbacks.

And second, it is not useless to meet WCAG. A lot of the criticism of WCAG is that it doesn’t do enough and that certain groups of people are underrepresented. This is certainly true for cognitive and learning disabilities.

That said, most WCAG success criteria cast a wide net and ensuring that they are met often addresses technical needs for a vast variety of users. An accessible name can be used by assistive technologies like screen readers and voice control, but they also can help with automation (“click ‘save’” in a Keyboard Maestro macro), or can be made visible using a user stylesheet.

Meeting WCAG lays the basis, the foundational layer for accessibility to happen at all. User testing will give you only little information if the users are unable to interact with the site at all.

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I'm a web accessibility professional who cares deeply about inclusion and an open web for everyone. I work with Axess Lab as an accessibility specialist. Previously, I worked with Knowbility, the World Wide Web Consortium, and Aktion Mensch. In this blog I publish my own thoughts and research about the web industry.

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Don’t minimize meeting WCAG!

I have been in meetings with clients that have made huge improvements in a accessibility, learning the right lessons, achieving or at least approaching WCAG compliance. And they felt like their work was undermined because “WCAG is not enough”. But nothing could be further from the truth. Their WCAG compliant or much improved websites, shops, and apps made it even possible for users to use the site for the first time.

Sure, there are always obstacles and things that should be improved, but reaching WCAG is something to celebrate. It is so difficult to have accessibility wins, and it makes the whole process so draining. Clients feel like they cannot do anything correct enough which leads to frustration and burn out. Especially for those who are invested in making accessibility a reality.

And because we set the “standard” above the standard, accessibility people within clients do not meet their goals, don’t get promoted, are discouraged, and leave.

WCAG is deliberately achievable, and everyone who works in accessibility will say “easily achievable”, but in reality, the obstacles are not technical but human or organizational or political. And reaching WCAG compliance despite those headwinds is an achievement.

This is part of the job. Sorry.

This job, like any other job, is not wish fulfillment. Our job is not to change clients to use the purest accessibility techniques. Our job is to enable clients and their teams to make the most out of the circumstances at hand. That sometimes means to prioritize or fixes over others because they are more achievable. It sometimes means using aria-label instead of a more accessible technique.

Should you push to do more after the foundation is built? Yes. But if that is impossible, it is sometimes just out of your control. And that‘s OK, too. We guide people and teams on their way to making things more accessible, but inevitably our paths diverge before they reach anything close to perfection. Some clients part ways once they have met WCAG, some when they think they are in the clear from fines and lawsuits. This does not devalue your work, it does not mean you have been not ambitious enough. It means you did everything you could to improve accessibility there.