The 55: what WCAG 2.2 AA actually asks of your website

When a demand letter cites your website, it cites WCAG: the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. The current version is WCAG 2.2, and the level that courts and the Department of Justice reference is Level AA. Level A and Level AA together contain 55 success criteria. That set of 55 is the whole game.

Each criterion is a concrete, testable requirement. Images need text alternatives. Text needs enough contrast against its background. Every feature has to work with a keyboard alone. Forms have to tell users what went wrong when they make a mistake. None of it is abstract.

Why can't a scanner just check all 55?

Automated rules engines are good at criteria with a right answer in the code: a missing alt attribute, a contrast ratio below 4.5 to 1, a form control without a label. That covers roughly a third of the 55.

The rest need judgment or interaction. Does the page trap keyboard focus? Does a single-key shortcut hijack a speech user's dictation? Does an error message actually explain the error? Is the reading order sensible when styles are stripped away? A static rule cannot answer those questions, which is why the biggest name in the space publicly claims its automated testing covers 37 of the 55 and says the rest requires human experts.

That gap is the reason full audits have historically cost five figures and taken months. The manual criteria are the expensive ones.

How RemediADA closes the gap

We built detection layers that do what a human auditor does: they use the page. A keyboard probe walks the site with real key presses and watches where focus goes. A character-key probe presses every printable key and watches for hijacked shortcuts. A form probe submits a form empty, with every outbound request blocked, and checks whether the page explains the error. A vision layer reads screenshots for what code alone cannot see. A cross-page layer compares navigation across the crawl.

Each layer is patent-pending, and each finding records which layer confirmed it. When a criterion passes because the risky pattern simply is not present, the scan records that evidence too. The result is coverage of all 55 criteria on paid audits, with proof attached, not a checkbox.

What you should do with this

The legal climate does not reward waiting. 3,117 federal website accessibility lawsuits were filed in 2025 alone, and UsableNet's census found 95.9% percent of home pages failing WCAG. A free scan takes about a minute and shows you where your site stands against the same standard a plaintiff firm would use.