WCAG 2.2 AA Checklist: Testing Accessibility for Marketers

A WCAG checklist is a practical translation of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines into checkpoints you can run through yourself: does your text have enough contrast, does everything work with the keyboard, and does a screen reader understand your forms? WCAG 2.2 at level AA is the standard most organisations aim for. In this article you get a concrete checklist per theme, you read which audit tools (such as WAVE and axe) take the heavy lifting off your hands, and where manual testing remains indispensable.

What exactly is WCAG 2.2 AA?

WCAG 2.2 is the current version of the W3C’s international accessibility guidelines and contains 87 success criteria, spread across levels A, AA and AAA. For AA conformance you meet all A and AA criteria together. Level A is the absolute minimum, AAA is the strictest and often not achievable for a whole site. AA is therefore the practical norm: strict enough to be genuinely usable, realistic enough to sustain.

Version 2.2 added nine new success criteria compared with 2.1, several of which are directly relevant for marketing sites: think of a minimum size for clickable elements, visible focus and simpler authentication. The guidelines revolve around four principles, summarised as POUR: content must be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. Those four words are a handy anchor when you are unsure which category a problem falls under.

Which checkpoints are on the checklist?

The core of a WCAG 2.2 AA checklist breaks down into a handful of themes. Run through them page by page, starting with your most important templates (homepage, services page, contact page, blog article).

Colour and contrast

• Normal text has a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 with the background; large text at least 3:1.
• Colour is never the only way to convey information (for example, an error message is not only red but also comes with text or an icon).
• Buttons, links and form fields are clearly visible in their focus and hover states too.

Text and structure

• Headings follow a logical hierarchy (one H1, below it H2s, and so on) without skipping levels.
• Links have descriptive text; avoid stray “read more” links without context.
• Text stays readable when you zoom in to 200 percent without content dropping out or overlapping.

Images and media

• Content images have meaningful alt text; purely decorative images get an empty alt so a screen reader skips them.
• Videos with speech have captions.

Keyboard and focus

• Everything that works with the mouse also works with the keyboard alone (Tab, Enter, arrow keys).
• The focus order is logical and the focus indicator is always visible, including at the top of the page (a new point of attention in 2.2).
• There is no keyboard trap: you can always navigate back out of an element.

Forms

• Every field has a visible, linked label, not just a placeholder.
• Error messages state what went wrong and how to fix it.
• Clickable elements such as buttons are large enough to hit comfortably on mobile.

Those last two themes touch your conversion directly. A form that is unclear to a screen reader user is usually also confusing for a hurried visitor. You can read more about this in our guide on form conversion optimisation.

How do you test this with audit tools like WAVE and axe?

Start with an automated scan, because it finds a fair share of the technical errors in minutes. Two widely used, free browser extensions are WAVE (from WebAIM) and axe DevTools (from Deque). You install them in your browser, open a page and immediately get an overview of errors, warnings and the structure of the page. Lighthouse, built into Chrome, also gives an accessibility score; how to read those reports is covered in our explainer on Google Lighthouse.

What these tools do well: spotting missing alt text, contrast that is too low, missing form labels, a faulty heading structure and missing language settings. What they cannot do: judge whether an alt text is substantively correct, whether the focus order feels logical, or whether an error message is genuinely understandable. That is why the honest expectation is that automated tools catch roughly a third to a half of the problems. They are a starting point, not a finish line.

Practical approach: run WAVE or axe over your most important page types, fix the reported errors, and use the warnings as a checklist for manual review.

Where is manual testing still needed?

Manual testing is indispensable because the most impactful accessibility problems are contextual and only a human can assess them. Three checks you can do yourself without much expertise:

1. The keyboard test. Put your mouse aside and navigate an important flow (for example, from homepage to contact form) with only Tab, Shift+Tab and Enter. Can you reach everywhere, do you always see where the focus is, and can you submit the form? If not, you have found a blocker that no scan picks up.

2. The screen reader test. Turn on a screen reader (VoiceOver on Mac, NVDA on Windows is free) and have a page read aloud. Do your links and buttons make sense out of their context? Are images described meaningfully? This feels awkward, but twenty minutes teaches you an enormous amount.

3. The zoom and mobile test. Zoom in to 200 percent and view the page on a narrow screen. Does everything stay readable and usable, or does content drop out?

For a full audit or a legally substantiated conformance report, bring in a specialised tester, often someone who uses assistive technology themselves. But you pick most of the low-hanging fruit yourself with these manual checks. If you want to know which errors occur most often, read our rundown of the most common web accessibility mistakes.

Why is this relevant for B2B marketers?

Accessibility is relevant for two reasons: it is good for your conversion and it is increasingly a requirement. The European Accessibility Act has been in force since 28 June 2025 and obliges a growing group of organisations to make their digital services accessible. The law is primarily aimed at consumer-facing products and services, so not every pure B2B site falls within the strict legal scope, but the direction is clear: accessibility is shifting from nice-to-have to standard expectation. For public institutions, an obligation has applied for longer.

More important for daily practice is the effect on leads. The same things that make a site accessible also make it nicer for everyone: readable text, clear buttons, logical navigation and forms that go right the first time. That is exactly what we focus on at Customer Impact, on a site that turns visitors into requests rather than on vanity statistics. A logical, accessible menu structure supports that directly; see also our guide on website navigation. Accessibility does not have to be a separate project: build it in as part of a well-considered, conversion-oriented website, and it costs far less than repairing it afterwards. It belongs in the broader approach we describe in the B2B website guide.

The short summary

WCAG 2.2 AA is the practical norm for accessibility. Work in two layers: let a tool like WAVE or axe find the technical errors, and then do the keyboard, screen reader and zoom test yourself for everything a machine cannot assess. Start with your most important page types and your conversion points, because that is where accessibility immediately delivers better results too. That way you not only meet the guidelines, but build a site that works for every visitor.

Do you want your website reviewed for accessibility and conversion at the same time? Plan your free intake.