Spell-check text input and offer fixes
G194 spell-checks text the reader has entered and offers corrections when it can. W3C's test has a second half people skip. It is not enough to display a suggestion. There has to be a mechanism to put the suggested word into the form, so a message reading 'did you mean' with nothing to click fails the technique. W3C lists it as sufficient for the Level AAA help criterion, and at Level AA for status messages when paired with the technique that announces them. It is not on the list for the error suggestion rule. That rule is served by a different set. The people W3C names are worth knowing, because they are not only the group you would guess. Readers with cognitive disabilities who spell approximately, blind and low-vision users who mistype, and people with dexterity disabilities working through a head pointer or scanning software.
How we find it in an audit
Our reviewers type realistic misspellings into search boxes and text fields, then look at what comes back. Zero results, no suggestion. That is the finding. Where a suggestion appears, we check we can accept it in one action rather than being told what we should have typed. Turning off spell-check on a text field is worth questioning too, since the browser was doing that work for free.
How affected users experience it
For readers with dyslexia, spelling is the tax on every text field. A search that answers a misspelling with 'no results found' reads to them as 'we have nothing', when the content is right there behind a door that wanted an exact password. An offered correction they can accept in one click turns their most frequent error into a non-event.
Passes vs. fails
Passes
The same search answers 'Showing results for receive receipt template', with a link to search the original spelling instead.
Fails
A store search for 'recieve reciept template' returns '0 products found' and nothing else, with spellcheck turned off on the box for good measure.
Other ways to satisfy this rule
6 guides on this site are filed under 3.3.5 Help. W3C lists this one as sufficient for that rule on its own. Implement it correctly, in a way your readers' software actually supports, and the rule is met.
This guide is our interpretation of W3C technique G194: Providing spell checking and suggestions for text input. W3C publishes its techniques as guidance rather than as the standard, and says so on every one of them. The success criterion is what conformance is measured against, and a technique is one documented way to meet it.