WCAG Explained in Plain English (Guide)

A slightly longer companion to the blog primer—useful for stakeholders who want talking points without reading the full spec.

When to use this guide

When teammates ask what WCAG means without reading the spec, or you need shared vocabulary before triaging scan results.

Anyone new to accessibility standards who will still use the scanner and issue library day to day.

Example

WCAG buckets map to patterns you can recognize in HTML: text alternatives, keyboard paths, clear errors, valid semantics.

Skips levels

Page title

Subsection (styled as heading but wrong level)

Logical sequence

H1 Page title

H2 Section

H3 Subsection

Why this matters: Teams triage faster when vocabulary matches what automated rules and manual tests describe.

Perceivable

Body text sample

Fails WCAG AA for normal text

Body text sample

Stronger contrast

Contrast is a first gate

Many AA failures are measurable color pairs on text and controls.

Paste a public URL. You get a shareable report. Fix issues, deploy, then rescan the same URL to compare results.

This guide mirrors our blog article with a few extra notes for workshops:

Map WCAG success criteria to your design system backlog.
Pair each release train with a short regression scan on templates.
Publish internal examples of good vs. bad patterns so authors copy the right thing.

For deep dives, pair this guide with the issue library and platform-specific checklists.

Ship a fix, then run another scan on the same URL. Each run gets its own report link so you can compare before and after.