Free tools · Checker
WCAG conformance claim checker
A conformance claim has five required components, and most drafts carry three. This walks through all five, then the three scope conditions the claim rests on. Start with the first question even if you think you have not made a claim, because a badge is one.
What the answers say
Nothing answered yet. Work down the questions on the left and the missing components appear here, with what to write for each one.
What it checks
The five required components
The date, the guidelines title with version and address, the level satisfied, a description of the pages covered including whether subdomains are in, and the technologies relied upon. Five, no more and no fewer.
Whether a logo has quietly made the claim for you
A conformance logo is itself a claim and has to be accompanied by the same five components. A badge with no claim page is an incomplete claim rather than no claim.
Whether part of a page was carved out
Conformance is for full pages only and cannot be achieved if part of a page is excluded. So a carve-out shrinks what the claim can cover.
Whether a process is only half covered
When a page is one of a series presenting a process, every page in that process has to conform at the level claimed or better. Four out of five pages in a checkout is none of them.
What to do about content you do not control
WCAG gives two routes and no third: monitor and repair within two business days, or make a statement of partial conformance in the prescribed form. It prints the form rather than paraphrasing it.
What it cannot tell you
- Whether the claim is true. It reads six answers and has never seen your site. A complete claim about content that does not meet the criteria is a complete claim and a false one, and only an evaluation settles which you have.
- Whether you need to make a claim at all. Claims are optional, and you can conform to WCAG without making one. Where a law requires a published statement, that is a different document with its own required contents.
- Whether a claim satisfies a particular law. Some regimes adopt the conformance requirements by name and some do not, and applicability is a legal question rather than a checklist one.
- Anything about the optional components. They are listed on the result, labelled optional, and never counted as missing, because WCAG introduces them with the words consider providing and a checker that turns a recommendation into a defect is inventing a rule.
Where to go next
- The five conformance requirementsWhat the pages behind a claim actually have to satisfy, which is the other five.
- The accessibility statementThe document a law is more likely to require, and how it differs from a claim.
- What counts as a web pageConformance is defined only for pages, so this decides what a claim can cover.
- What a conformance report cannot tell youWhy an ACR is not a conformance claim, however detailed it gets.