What a WCAG compliant website looks like

What WCAG is and who writes it

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are written by the World Wide Web Consortium, the body that publishes the web's standards. WCAG 2.2 is the current version. Level AA is the middle of three levels and the one people usually mean.

It is a standard, not a law. Laws such as the ADA borrow it as a yardstick. This page explains the standard; it is not legal advice about which law applies to you.

Perceivable, so people can take the content in

Perceivable means every piece of content can reach the person in some form. An image has a text alternative for someone who cannot see it. A video has captions for someone who cannot hear it.

Text has enough contrast against its background. The page still makes sense when someone zooms in, or turns off the styling, or listens to it read aloud.

Color on its own is the classic miss. A red border on a field that failed says nothing to someone who cannot see red. Put the words next to it.

Operable, so people can move through the page

Operable means a person can get around the page and use its controls without a mouse. Every link, button and field can be reached with the Tab key, and you can see where you are.

Nothing traps the keyboard. Nothing flashes. A person gets enough time to fill in a form, and the main heading and the section headings let them jump to the part they want.

The order matters too. Tab should move through the page in the order a sighted person reads it, not jump from the footer to the menu and back.

Understandable, so the words and the layout make sense

Understandable is about the words and the behavior. Plain language a stranger can follow. Labels that say what a field wants. Error messages that say what went wrong and how to fix it. Plain words are genuinely useful to everyone, not only to the people the standard names.

It is also about predictability. The navigation is in the same place on every page. A link that looks like a link is one. Nothing changes under the reader without warning.

Working with assistive technology

The fourth principle is that the page works with the tools people use: screen readers, voice control, switch devices, browser zoom. That comes down to clean HTML. Real headings, real lists, real buttons, labels attached to their fields.

A page built from the right pieces is read correctly by a tool the author never tested. A page built from lookalike pieces is not, and no amount of styling fixes that.

A quick way to feel this is to read your page with the styling switched off. If it still reads top to bottom in a sensible order, the pieces underneath are right.

The checks a business site can do this week

You do not need a specialist for a first pass. Sit down with your own site and try a few things.

Each of those takes a few minutes, and each finds the problems people actually hit.

• Put the mouse away and move through a page with Tab and Enter
• Read each image's description and ask whether it says what the picture shows
• Zoom the browser in a long way and see whether the text reflows
• Read the headings alone, top to bottom, and see whether they tell the story
• Fill in the form and see whether each field says what it wants

What the builder's pages carry, and what a checker cannot see

Every page written by Website Builder Studio carries one main heading with the section headings in order. It has a label on every field, contrast that passes the published standard, real links and lists, and structured data. It passes a check that runs before anything publishes, validated against Google Search Essentials and modern web standards.

A checker can see structure. It cannot see whether an image description is true, whether a sentence is plain, or whether a heading is honest. Those are yours, and the in-app assistant can help you with the words.

Accessibility is a practice, not a badge. The builder keeps the structural half on every save; you keep the honest half on every edit. The ADA page covers the law side.