Glossary · Accessibility term

Conformance

Conformance means satisfying all the requirements of a standard, and WCAG has five of them rather than one. The first is the level. Every applicable success criterion at A, AA or AAA is met in full, or a conforming alternate version is provided instead. The other four are not success criteria at all, and none of them comes in separate A, AA and AAA versions. They are applied at whatever level you are claiming. The whole page counts and no part of it can be set aside. Every page in a process conforms or none of them does. Only accessibility-supported ways of using a technology can be relied on. And anything you are not relying on still must not block access to the rest of the page. The other thing to know is the unit. WCAG defines conformance for web pages only, so it is always a page that conforms and never a site in the abstract. What a claim can cover is one page, a series of pages or many related pages, and that is the sentence people mean when they say the site is AA.

In practice

It is all or nothing inside a level, which is why any percentage you have been shown came from a tool rather than from the standard. A page conforms at AA only if it meets every applicable A and AA criterion, or offers a conforming alternate version instead. There is no partial credit and no score. What WCAG does allow is reporting progress above the level you reached. A site at AA can say which AAA criteria it also meets, and that is the sanctioned way to show work in hand without overclaiming.

Two things count as part of a page that people leave out of the reckoning. Each responsive variation the page presents at different screen sizes has to conform in its own right, so a mobile layout is not a separate thing you can quietly skip. And an alternative reachable directly from the page, like a long description or an alternative presentation of a video, is part of that page too rather than a separate destination.

There is a sanctioned way to keep something out of a claim, and it works at the level of the whole page rather than the content on it. A page that cannot conform, such as one demonstrating a flashing hazard, is kept out of the claim's scope entirely. What you cannot do is scope out the awkward parts of a page you are claiming, because conformance is for full pages and part of a page can never be excluded.

Why it matters

Sites change every week, so conformance is a snapshot with a date on it rather than a state you arrive at and keep. A page that conformed in March has a new marketing banner by June. That is why honest statements say partially conformant, and why the date is one of the five things a formal claim has to carry. Conformance is also not the same thing as being accessible. It is a formal property of content measured against a standard, and W3C is explicit that meeting every criterion at all three levels still will not work for people with every combination of disability. Passing is the floor of the conversation rather than the end of it.

Why AAA is not the ambitious answer

W3C says in the standard itself that Level AAA should not be required as a general policy for an entire site, because some content cannot satisfy all of it. Asking a supplier for AAA across a website is therefore asking for something the standards body has advised against in writing. AA is the bar nearly every law names, and meeting it in full is harder than it sounds.

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