In October 2023, the W3C quietly published a small dot-release of the most important standard most business owners have never read. It added nine new success criteria to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and then, just as quietly, the Department of Justice’s Title II rule pinned every state and local government website in the country to it.

If you run a small business, the practical question is not whether WCAG 2.2 applies to you. It will, eventually — through a contract, a procurement requirement, or a complaint from a real person who couldn’t use your site. The practical question is which of the new criteria you’re already meeting, and how much work the rest will actually take.

The short answer: probably more than you think, and less than you fear. Here’s the working translator we’ve been giving clients for the last six months.

Why 2.2, and why now

WCAG 2.0 came out in 2008. 2.1 followed in 2018, mostly to address mobile and low-vision users. 2.2 exists for a different reason: cognitive accessibility. The web has gotten harder to use, not easier — modal dialogs, dark patterns, infinite scroll, and drag-only interactions all assume a user with full executive function, perfect dexterity, and unlimited working memory.

2.2 draws three lines in the sand: targets must be big enough to hit, focus must be visible enough to follow, and tasks must not require remembering things the page already knows.

TL;DR
Nine new criteria, mostly Level AA. Six are about motor and cognitive load. Most well-built sites already pass three or four. Budget two to four weeks of audit-and-remediation, not a redesign.

The nine new success criteria

Here they are, in the order they actually matter for a typical small business site: target size, visible focus, drag alternatives, redundant entry, accessible authentication, consistent help, and the pieces of mobile interaction that fail quietly until a real person runs into them.

Target size, simply

Buttons, links, and touch targets need room around them. If someone is tapping your CTA on a bus, this matters.

Focus, made visible

Keyboard users need a strong, obvious focus state. If you have to squint to find it, it fails the spirit even when it passes the letter.

Cognitive load, finally addressed

If your form already knows the answer, don’t force people to remember and re-enter it.

Are you already meeting it?

Usually, yes — in pieces. Clean button spacing, visible hover and focus states, descriptive error messages, and not making people retype obvious information already gets a well-built brochure site halfway there. The misses tend to be mundane: tiny footer links, carousels that trap keyboard focus, placeholder-only form labels, icon-only buttons, and tap targets that were designed on a large monitor.

That is the useful part of 2.2. It does not ask you to rebuild your site around a new philosophy. It asks you to remove the quiet friction that accumulates when design decisions are made for speed, not use. In audit after audit, the expensive fixes are rarely the issue. The issue is consistency.

A six-week roadmap

If the site is already live and generally healthy, the fastest path is not a redesign. It is a short, disciplined remediation cycle: week one is inventory, week two is keyboard and screen-reader testing, weeks three and four are design and code fixes, and weeks five and six are regression checks, content edits, and making sure the same mistakes do not reappear in the CMS.