WCAG 2.2 for marketing websites: what changed, what the law says, what it costs to ignore

Short answer: WCAG 2.2 AA is the sensible build target for any marketing site in 2026, even though no North American law mandates it yet (Ontario’s AODA cites 2.0 AA; US courts and the Department of Justice use 2.1 AA). The nine new criteria in 2.2 are mostly small, concrete and aimed at the parts of a marketing site that get the least attention: the sticky header that hides the keyboard focus, the cookie banner’s tiny close button, the carousel that only works by dragging, the lead form that asks for your email twice. The legal risk is real and rising, the overlay widgets that promise to fix it have been fined by the FTC, and the most common failures are the cheapest to prevent.

What WCAG 2.2 adds, in marketing-site terms

WCAG 2.2 became a W3C Recommendation in October 2023 (current edition December 2024) and adds nine success criteria to 2.1 (W3C). Six are Level A or AA, and every one of them maps to something on a typical company site:

None of these is expensive to build correctly from the start. All of them are tedious to retrofit after a site has shipped with a third-party carousel and a cookie plugin nobody configured.

Where the law actually stands

This is the part marketing leaders most often get wrong in both directions, so here it is plainly.

Canada. Ontario’s AODA requires organisations with 50 or more employees to have public websites meeting WCAG 2.0 AA since January 2021, with penalties up to $100,000 a day for corporations and $50,000 a day for directors; organisations with 20+ employees file a compliance report every three years, and the next one is due 31 December 2026 (Gowling WLG, Ontario.ca). Enforcement has been light in practice. The federal Accessible Canada Act applies to federally regulated sectors (banks, telecom, transport) and requires published accessibility plans and feedback processes (Fasken). British Columbia’s Accessible BC Act currently binds public-sector bodies, with private-sector standards under consultation and regulation expected through 2026 (BC Gov). Law firms expect the standards to move toward 2.2; treat that as a forecast, not a rule.

United States. For state and local government (and their vendors), the DOJ’s Title II rule adopted WCAG 2.1 AA, with deadlines that were pushed back a year in April 2026 to 26 April 2027 for larger entities and 26 April 2028 for smaller ones, the department admitting it had "overestimated the capabilities" of those it covers (91 Fed. Reg. 20902). For businesses there is still no Title III web regulation; the standard is set by lawsuits, and plaintiffs use WCAG 2.1 AA. Those lawsuits are not slowing down: 3,117 website-accessibility suits in US federal court in 2025, up 27% on 2024 and 36% of all ADA Title III filings, concentrated in New York, Florida and Illinois (Seyfarth Shaw). Add state courts and UsableNet counts 5,114 for the year, about 70% against e-commerce, and 64% of defendants with revenue under $25 million (UsableNet). Demand letters settled privately are not in either number.

European Union. The European Accessibility Act has applied since 28 June 2025 to consumer-facing e-commerce, banking, ticketing and similar services, including non-EU companies selling to EU consumers; a brochure site is largely out of scope, a site with a checkout or self-service account for EU consumers is not (European Commission).

The practical read for a North American marketing team: build to 2.2 AA, document it against 2.1 AA for US contracts and 2.0 AA for AODA, and keep the evidence.

What fails, and how often

WebAIM’s 2025 analysis of the top million home pages found detectable WCAG failures on 94.8% of them, an average of 51 errors per page, and only a 3.1-point improvement in six years (WebAIM Million). Six error types account for 96% of everything found:

1. Low-contrast text (79.1% of pages)
2. Missing image alt text (55.5%)
3. Missing form labels (48.2%)
4. Empty links (45.4%)
5. Empty buttons (29.6%)
6. Missing document language (15.8%)

Every one of these is a template-level fix: set the contrast in the design tokens, require alt text in the editor, label the form fields, give icon buttons a name. A site built on a design system gets them right everywhere at once; a site assembled from plugins and page-builder blocks gets them wrong everywhere at once. WebAIM also found that pages using ARIA had twice as many errors as pages without, which is the technical way of saying "bolting on accessibility attributes without understanding them makes things worse."

What a scanner can and cannot tell you

Automated tools are necessary and insufficient. When the UK Government Digital Service built a page with 143 known barriers and ran ten tools against it, the best one found about 41% and 29% of barriers were missed by every tool (GDS). Deque’s larger study puts automation at 57% of issue volume across 13,000 pages, while the share of WCAG criteria that can be fully automated is the oft-quoted 20–30% (Deque). Both are true.

What a scanner cannot judge is almost exactly the list of new 2.2 criteria: whether the focus is obscured by your sticky header, whether the carousel’s click alternative works, whether alt text is meaningful, whether the cookie banner traps keyboard focus. That is a ten-minute keyboard pass and a screen-reader pass per template, and it is why "we ran a scan" is not the same as "we tested it."

The overlay question

Accessibility overlays (the floating "accessibility" widget that promises WCAG compliance from one line of JavaScript) are the most common thing we are asked about and the easiest to answer. In January 2025 the FTC ordered accessiBe to pay $1 million and barred it from claiming its product makes sites WCAG-compliant without evidence; the Bureau of Consumer Protection director’s line was that "overstating a product’s AI or other capabilities without adequate evidence is deceptive" (FTC). In 2025, 28% of accessibility lawsuits were filed against sites that already had a widget installed (UsableNet). The practitioner community’s position is collected in the Overlay Fact Sheet. Spend the money on the template instead.

Why it is also good marketing

Three reasons that have nothing to do with lawsuits. Procurement: public-sector buyers and most enterprise security questionnaires ask for a WCAG conformance statement or a VPAT; agencies that cannot produce one get delayed or disqualified (WebAIM). Search: Googlebot reads the same signals a screen reader does, including semantic headings, alt text and descriptive link text, and when NPR’s This American Life added transcripts its search traffic rose 6.86% (W3C business case). Revenue: the UK’s Click-Away Pound survey found 69% of disabled online shoppers leave sites they find hard to use, and 86% have paid more on an accessible site rather than buy cheaper on a difficult one (Click-Away Pound).

What we do on every build

Design tokens with AA contrast baked in, so the cream-and-plum palette on this site passes before a page exists. Semantic HTML and a real heading order. Keyboard and screen-reader passes on every template before stakeholder review. Focus rings that are visible, and scroll-padding so the sticky header never hides them. Carousels with buttons, targets at 24 px, forms with labels and useful errors, no transcription CAPTCHAs. Then a written accessibility note delivered with QA, and a statement you can cite in your own policy.

If you want to know where an existing site stands, the free audit includes an automated accessibility pass; for a full WCAG 2.2 AA audit with a prioritised fix list that doubles as a quote, see Trust & security, or watch for Apex Access on apex.mountainairweb.com.