Because it reaches more customers and lowers legal risk at once. One in six people lives with significant disability, India's Supreme Court treats digital access as part of the right to life, SEBI now requires accessible platforms across the securities market, and WCAG 2.2 AA is the standard to build to.
Make your website accessible because it reaches more customers and lowers legal risk at the same time. The sensible target in 2026 is WCAG 2.2 at level AA. It is the current W3C standard, and in October 2025 W3C announced its approval as the international standard ISO/IEC 40500:2025, which W3C says enables more countries to formally adopt it. Several of its requirements, such as text alternatives for images and descriptive links, also help search engines understand a site.
Most sites are not there yet. When WebAIM scanned the top one million home pages in February 2025, nearly all had detectable failures, and six basic error types made up 96% of everything it found. That is the encouraging part: WebAIM points out that tackling only those few error types would make a significant difference across the web.
- people worldwide live with significant disability, about 1.3 billion (WHO)
- 1 in 6
- people worldwide live with significant disability, about 1.3 billion (WHO)
- of the top million home pages had detectable WCAG 2 failures in 2025
- 94.8%
- of the top million home pages had detectable WCAG 2 failures in 2025
- detectable errors on the average home page in WebAIM's 2025 scan
- 51
- detectable errors on the average home page in WebAIM's 2025 scan
- minimum tap target size under WCAG 2.2 AA, unless targets are spaced apart
- 24 px
- minimum tap target size under WCAG 2.2 AA, unless targets are spaced apart
01
What WCAG 2.2 asks for, and what is new
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines have three conformance levels, A, AA and AAA, and AA is the practical target for a business site. WCAG 2.2 became a W3C Recommendation on 5 October 2023 and was last updated in December 2024. It keeps the earlier requirements, removes the obsolete 4.1.1 Parsing criterion and adds nine new success criteria, six of them at level A or AA.
| Criterion | Level | What it means in practice |
|---|---|---|
| 2.4.11 Focus Not Obscured (Minimum) | AA | A sticky header or chat widget must not completely hide the element a keyboard user is on |
| 2.5.7 Dragging Movements | AA | Anything you drag, such as a slider, also works with a single tap or click |
| 2.5.8 Target Size (Minimum) | AA | Buttons and links at least 24 by 24 CSS pixels, or spaced so a tap cannot hit a neighbour |
| 3.2.6 Consistent Help | A | Help options such as contact details appear in the same relative order on each page that repeats them |
| 3.3.7 Redundant Entry | A | Details already given in a process are filled in or offered for selection, not typed again |
| 3.3.8 Accessible Authentication (Minimum) | AA | Logins do not rely on a memory or puzzle test without an alternative or help |
02
The compliance stick is getting heavier in India
The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 requires the government to frame accessibility rules under Section 40. In November 2024, in Rajive Raturi v Union of India, the Supreme Court held that the existing rule offered only persuasive guidelines rather than binding standards, and ordered mandatory rules within three months. Among the principles for those rules, it listed assistive technology such as screen readers and accessible digital interfaces across public and private platforms.
In April 2025 the Court went further. Hearing petitions by acid attack survivors and a petitioner who is completely blind, which sought accessible digital KYC, it held that digital access is part of the right to life under Article 21 and issued twenty directions to make the eKYC process accessible.
Regulators are now acting on that reasoning. In a circular of 31 July 2025 that cites the April judgment, SEBI required every entity it regulates, from stockbrokers and mutual funds to stock exchanges, to make its digital platforms accessible. It names WCAG 2.1 or the latest version, India's GIGW guidelines and the Indian Standard IS 17802 as the baseline, requires audits by IAAP-certified professionals that include testing by persons with disabilities, and wants accessibility written into every tender and procurement contract. If you build websites or software for brokers, fund houses or other SEBI-regulated firms, that requirement now reaches you.
Bridging the digital divide is no longer a matter of policy discretion but has become a constitutional imperative
03
The commercial carrot is bigger
The World Health Organization estimates that 1.3 billion people, 16% of the world's population, live with significant disability, and says the number is growing because of noncommunicable diseases and people living longer. Many more customers have a temporary or situational limit: a broken wrist, a child on one arm, a phone used on a bumpy bus. W3C's notes on the target size rule list people with hand tremors, people using a device with one hand and people on shaky public transport among those it helps.
Inaccessible sites can lose these customers without anyone noticing, for example at the enquiry form: a field a screen reader cannot announce may stop a blind visitor from sending you an enquiry. WebAIM's most common failures read like a list of lost leads:
- Low-contrast text, on 79.1% of home pages
- Images missing alternative text, 55.5%
- Form fields without labels, 48.2%
- Empty links, 45.4%
- Empty buttons, 29.6%
- No declared page language, 15.8%
04
Where the same work helps search engines
Some of what a screen reader needs, a crawler needs too. Google says it uses alt text, together with computer vision and the page's content, to understand images, and that the same text helps people who cannot see them. Its link guidance asks for descriptive anchor text inside real links, lists 'click here' and 'read more' as too generic and gives an empty link as a bad example. WebAIM found empty links on 45.4% of home pages.
The overlap has limits, and Google says so. Its SEO starter guide says headings in semantic order are great for screen readers but that their order does not matter to Google Search, and Google works out a page's language from its visible text, not from the lang attribute. So treat alt text and link text as the common ground between accessibility and technical SEO, and do the rest for your visitors. For how AI browsers now read pages on a visitor's behalf, see our guide.
Language deserves a special mention in Kerala. W3C's Easy Checks explain that declaring a page's primary language lets speech tools pronounce its words correctly. If you publish in both Malayalam and English, mark each page with its own language rather than declaring English everywhere.
05
Where to start without a consultant
Start with an automated scan, then do the checks no tool can. Chrome's Lighthouse scores accessibility as a weighted average of pass-or-fail audits, so a page where only some buttons have names fails that audit outright. W3C is blunt about the limits: evaluation tools cannot determine accessibility on their own, and human judgement is required.
- Run Lighthouse from Chrome's developer tools on your homepage and enquiry page, and fix every failed audit.
- Put the mouse away. Use Tab, Shift+Tab and Enter to reach and submit your enquiry form, and check you can always see where you are.
- Listen to your site with VoiceOver on an iPhone or TalkBack on Android. Every button and field should announce what it does.
- Zoom in until the text is large, and check that nothing overlaps or disappears.
- Check contrast: normal text needs a ratio of at least 4.5:1 against its background.
06
What to do this month
- Run Lighthouse on your five most visited pages and fix the failed audits.
- Add alt text to meaningful images and a visible label to every form field.
- Raise body text contrast to at least 4.5:1.
- Make buttons and links at least 24 by 24 CSS pixels, or space them apart.
- Test the enquiry flow with only a keyboard, then with a screen reader.
- Put WCAG 2.2 AA in the contract for your next redesign.
Sources
Facts current as of 27 February 2026.