WCAG AA and AAA - WCAG 2.0 & 2.1

[mgifford]

I am looking at https://accessibility-manual.dwp.gov.uk/best-practice/wcag-aa-and-aaa

And I'm not sure that's the right approach. I think at this point it is useful talking about WCAG 2.0, 2.1, 2.2 & 3.0.

It isn't clear from this document that WCAG 2.0 requirements are included in WCAG 2.1 (but they are).

AAA should be aspirational, and AA the legal floor. Every government site should be AA, and depending on the audience of the site it may be important to prioritize which AAA criteria a department strives to achieve. You kind of get to this in the document but to meet WCAG AA, all WCAG A requirements need to be fulfilled.

This might be accurate:

Some of the impacts of making your service AAA will involve changing how a user interacts with your service and will go against security and GDS patterns, however, some will be fulfilled by default.

But folks seeing this will just stop reading any further. If there are specifics about AAA requirements that go against GDS & security best practices, be specific. There should be an issue queue somewhere to track current best practices to addressing this.

I'm not sure this is the best way to express this either:

We have a legal requirement to meet AA, however to meet AAA we have to meet every single one of the WCAG 2.1 criteria.

I don't think a government website exists that can claim to be AAA compliant. Certainly the W3C isn't. Being WCAG 2.x AAA compliant is next to impossible, and considerably increases the costs of building and maintaining a site. Not that those aren't worth striving for, but nobody should be talking about AAA compliance, as it doesn't really exist.