Glossary · Accessibility term
WCAG2ICT
WCAG2ICT explains how to apply WCAG to things that are not web pages. Documents that travel off the web, desktop and mobile applications, kiosks, and interfaces built into hardware. It exists because WCAG's own words, web page and user agent, do not carry across cleanly to any of those, so somebody had to work through each success criterion and say how to read it there. Your PDF is still opened by something, and the Note says so in as many words. What changes is how the work divides between the thing you wrote and the thing that opens it. What WCAG2ICT is not is a standard. It is a W3C Group Note, dated 11 December 2025, published on a different track from a Recommendation. Its status line says it is endorsed by the working group that wrote it and not by W3C itself nor its Members. The document says the same thing about itself in plainer words. It provides informative guidance that is not normative and does not set requirements.
In practice
The Group Note distinction is why the masthead is worth reading. WCAG 2.2 is a W3C Recommendation. WCAG2ICT is a W3C Group Note. One creates requirements a law can adopt. The other is guidance on how to read those requirements somewhere WCAG did not originally reach, and the patent commitments that come with a Recommendation do not attach to a Note at all.
Two limits decide whether it can help you. It covers Levels A and AA. Level AAA was not addressed, so a AAA obligation on a piece of desktop software has no answer here. And the current edition covers WCAG 2.0, 2.1 and 2.2, which is worth knowing because a great deal of published commentary still treats it as a 2.0-only document. A third limit is worth saying out loud. Reading WCAG onto a device is not the same as covering everything that can go wrong with one, and hardware and closed functionality raise questions this document was never written to answer.
It also tells you not to assume. The document says outright that not all success criteria have been fully adopted in every local regulation, and that anybody implementing it should consider the applicability of each criterion to non-web documents and software. So it describes a mechanism rather than an obligation, and the obligation still comes from whichever law or contract you are answering to.
Why it matters
It is the reason your internal software, your kiosks and documents that travel off the web are in scope of something written for the web. Procurement standards on both sides of the Atlantic reach past websites, and this is the translation that makes that possible. Knowing it is a Note rather than a Recommendation cuts both ways in a room. It stops anybody presenting it as a requirement in its own right, and it stops anybody dismissing it, because the requirement was never coming from here. It comes from the law that adopted WCAG in the first place.
What counts as non-web
A document is an assembly of content that works as a single item rather than a collection, is not part of software, and carries no user agent inside it. Letters, spreadsheets, emails, books, pictures, presentations and films are the examples the Note gives. It says in a note that a document always depends on a user agent to present it, so the point was never that nothing opens your PDF. Non-web software is the other half, and it reaches native mobile apps, desktop applications, kiosk software and the screen built into a machine, which is a far bigger surface than the words desktop software suggest.
Where this shows up on the site
Related terms
- WCAGWCAG is the international standard for web accessibility, published by the W3C.
- PDF/UAPDF/UA is the international standard for accessible PDF, published as ISO 14289 in two parts.
- Section 508Section 508 is the US law requiring federal departments and agencies, plus the Postal Service, to make their digital products accessible.
- EN 301 549EN 301 549 is the European standard for accessible information and communication technology, written first for public procurement and now the document European accessibility law reaches for when it needs a technical answer.
- ConformanceConformance means satisfying all the requirements of a standard, and WCAG has five of them rather than one.
Knowing the word is the easy part.
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