[Policy] Officially move to WCAG 2.2 AA Support

Created on 21 August 2025, 3 days ago

Problem/Motivation

This has been discussed in the Drupal Slack, but also in today's Drupal A11y Office Hour call.

There has been some confusion about what version of WCAG 2.x we are supporting. It has long move off of the 2008 standard, WCAG 2.0 AA. We've been using WCAG 2.1 AA for ages now, I believe it was adopted shortly after the official release in 2018. WCAG 2.2 was released in October of 2023, but even before that, tools that we, like axe and Accessibility Insights, used were including elements for WCAG 2.2.

The Accessibility Statement switched to 2.2 (January of this year - although I thought it was earlier):
https://www.drupal.org/about/features/accessibility

I think @awearring tried to bring this up to 2.2 in the Core Gates in April 2024.
https://www.drupal.org/node/3283713/revisions

https://www.drupal.org/docs/develop/standards/accessibility-coding-stand...

We've been pledging to be 2.2 in the GAAD pledge the last two years. We missed doing an update for 2025, but there are still two instances there where we talk about 2.2 adoption, going back to 2023.

https://www.drupal.org/association/blog/drupal-gaad-pledge-2023-update
https://www.drupal.org/association/blog/drupal-gaad-pledge-2024-update

The new issues, that the Accessibility Team has already been evaluating against, are:

Target Size has found some new issues, but not a lot.

Proposed resolution

Let's update to WCAG 2.2.

Remaining tasks

Update these pages:

📌 Task
Status

Active

Version

11.2 🔥

Component

base system

Created by

🇨🇦Canada mgifford Ottawa, Ontario

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  • Accessibility

    It affects the ability of people with disabilities or special needs (such as blindness or color-blindness) to use Drupal.

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Comments & Activities

  • Issue created by @mgifford
  • 🇺🇸United States kentr Durango, CO

    Suggestion for remaining tasks: Configure our Nightwatch implementation to use 2.2 for all Axe tests.

  • 🇺🇸United States mherchel Gainesville, FL, US

    From an Olivero and CSS maintainer position, a big +1.

    It's something that I don't believe will create a ton of issues. If issues are identified, they should be fixed. Plus, it makes Drupal's accessibility look behind the times if we say we only officially support 2.1.

  • 🇬🇧United Kingdom catch

    Adding some related issues.

    I think my main question is if an issue brings a UI up to 2.1 (or keeps it at 2.1), but a 2.2 issue is discovered with that same UI, then I don't think we should block on 2.2 issues but open separate issues to deal with those. I don't know if that's even a real concern though.

    If/when we do 📌 Automated A11y tests in PHPUnit Active I would also want the option to set it to a lower level if we can get tests to pass, then open another issue to go to 2.2 and open issues to fix those issues so we can enforce it. We've done this for many similar changes like phpstan because the tests prevent the regressions even at a lower level, whereas no tests don't prevent any regressions at all.

    Both of these are about how we get towards 2.2 rather than whether we should though, it makes sense to have that as the target.

  • 🇺🇸United States kentr Durango, CO

    @catch:

    I would also want the option to set it to a lower level if we can get tests to pass.

    The current MR on 📌 Automated A11y tests in PHPUnit Active supports passing Axe options with individual tests. The options can include the WCAG versions / levels to run (as tags). The test for that can be improved to explicitly test for disabling WCAG 2.2. Would that do it?

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