WCAG AA on an Irish website: what the law asks, and what to fix

Search S.I. No. 636 of 2023 for the word WCAG and you will not find it. The same is true of EN 301 549 and of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

What Schedule 1 requires is that websites and mobile applications be made perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. Those four words are the requirement. They are also, not coincidentally, the four principles WCAG is organised around, which is why the received summary is a reasonable shorthand and still not what the instrument says.

The distinction is not academic. It decides what a compliant answer looks like and what evidence is worth keeping.

Regulation 16(1) provides that products and services conforming to harmonised standards, the references to which have been published in the Official Journal of the European Union, are presumed to conform to the accessibility requirements. That is the normal mechanism of European product law: meet the cited standard and you are presumed compliant, and the burden shifts.

For the European Accessibility Act, no such standard has been cited. The European Commission's own harmonised standards register carries a single accessibility entry, and it is for Directive (EU) 2016/2102, the public sector web accessibility Directive. There is no entry for Directive (EU) 2019/882.

There is a fallback in Article 15 of the Directive allowing the Commission to adopt technical specifications where no harmonised standard exists. We found no such implementing act either.

So the presumption in Regulation 16 is currently an empty box. Compliance is judged against the functional requirements in Schedule 1, and conformance to a standard is evidence towards that rather than a defence in itself.

EN 301 549 is the European standard the whole system is built around, and its version numbering is a live source of error.

The published version is V3.2.1, dated March 2021. Its clause 9 is built on WCAG 2.1, requiring Level A and AA, with WCAG 2.1 AAA listed separately as informative. A draft V4.1.0 was at ETSI vote stage in June 2026 and moves to WCAG 2.2. There is no published V4.1.1 as at the end of August 2026, whatever a supplier's proposal says.

For the Irish public sector, the chain is complete and different. S.I. No. 358 of 2020 gives a presumption of conformity for harmonised standards, and the standard cited in the Official Journal under the public sector Directive is EN 301 549, updated to V3.2.1 by Commission Implementing Decision (EU) 2021/1339. That is where WCAG 2.1 AA becomes a legal reference point in Ireland: for public bodies, not for private businesses.

WCAG 2.2 is the current W3C Recommendation. It added nine success criteria over WCAG 2.1 and removed one, 4.1.1 Parsing, which is marked obsolete because assistive technology no longer parses HTML directly.

Only six of the nine additions are at Level A or AA, which is the level that matters: Consistent Help and Redundant Entry at A, and Focus Not Obscured (Minimum), Dragging Movements, Target Size (Minimum) and Accessible Authentication (Minimum) at AA. The other three are AAA.

The arithmetic is worth carrying because it is a fast way to spot a supplier who has not read the spec. WCAG 2.1 had 50 criteria at A and AA. Add six, remove one, and WCAG 2.2 has 55 at A and AA, 31 at A and 24 at AA. If a proposal says 56, it has counted the removed criterion's tombstone heading.

WCAG 3.0 is a Working Draft dated 3 March 2026. It has no legal status anywhere and no date attached to it. Treat any quotation of its requirements as speculation.

The findings repeat, and they cluster around the things that stop somebody completing a transaction rather than the things that lower a score.

The first is the AI disclosure. If you have added a chatbot, Article 50(5) of the AI Act requires the disclosure to be given in a clear and distinguishable manner and to conform with applicable accessibility requirements. A disclosure inside an image, or in a tooltip only reachable by hover, satisfies neither regime. The Article 50 duties are set out separately.

The second is the assessment. If you conclude that a requirement would be a disproportionate burden, Regulation 15 of S.I. 636/2023 requires that conclusion to be an assessment you can produce, it has to be renewed at least every five years, and Regulation 15(8) prevents you relying on it at all where you have received external funding for improving accessibility. Quietly skipping something and calling it disproportionate later is not the same document.

There is no certificate and no register under this Act, so the record is the evidence, and it should say three things: what was tested and against what version, what was found, and what was fixed or why it was not.

The most useful single artefact is a dated audit against WCAG 2.1 AA with the failures listed and the remediation dated. It is what demonstrates the four Schedule 1 properties were taken seriously, and it is what you would hand to the CCPC or to a consumer's solicitor.

It is also, given that the consumer can go straight to the Circuit Court under Regulation 30 without any regulator involved, the document most likely to matter.