Glossary · Accessibility term
Conformance claim
A conformance claim is an optional formal statement that content meets WCAG at a stated level. Make one and it has to carry five things. The date. The guidelines title, version and address, written out rather than implied. The level satisfied. A concise description of the pages covered, which has to say whether subdomains are included in the claim. And a list of the web content technologies relied upon. A conformance logo is itself a claim, so a badge in a footer with none of that behind it is an incomplete claim rather than a decoration.
In practice
WCAG never asks you to make one. Conforming without claiming is allowed and it is what most sites do, so the reason to publish a claim is that a contract, a regulator or a buyer wants it in writing. Publish one and all five components have to be there. Anything vaguer is an incomplete claim rather than a safe way of saying less, because the components are what the standard requires of anybody who makes one at all.
The description of the pages is where most claims go wrong, because it has to say whether subdomains are in or out. A claim written for example.com that says nothing about shop.example.com has left the most contested question in the document unanswered.
A claim covers content. No tool, agency or certificate can confer it, and a claim over a whole site cannot rest on a sample either, however carefully the sample was drawn, because there is always the possibility of an error on a page nobody opened.
Why it matters
Overclaiming is a legal exposure rather than a marketing one. A statement that says fully conformant when the checkout is not is a written admission that you knew the standard and said the wrong thing about it. A conformance logo carries the same weight, because using one is itself a claim and it has to be accompanied by all five components.
What a claim has to pin down
"This site conforms to WCAG 2.2 Level AA" is missing four of the five. This is the whole of one: "All pages under example.com/help, subdomains excluded, conform to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2 at https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG22/ at Level AA as of 1 March 2026, relying on HTML, CSS and JavaScript." The address is the component people drop, and W3C spells out the exact form it wants.
Where this shows up on the site
Related terms
- Partial conformanceA statement of partial conformance is what you publish when a page fails only because of content outside your control, such as user comments, an ad slot, or a third-party widget you cannot repair.
- Relied uponA technology is relied upon when the content would stop conforming if that technology were turned off, or if a user agent did not support it.
- Accessibility statementAn accessibility statement is a public page saying how accessible your site actually is.
Knowing the word is the easy part.
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