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 the four principles WCAG is organised around.

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

Under Regulation 16(1), products and services that meet a harmonised standard are presumed to meet the accessibility requirements, but only if the standard's reference has been published in the Official Journal of the European Union. That is how European product law normally works: meet the cited standard and you are presumed compliant, and the burden of proof 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.

Article 15 of the Directive has a fallback: where no harmonised standard exists, the Commission can adopt technical specifications instead. We found no such implementing act either.

For now, no standard qualifies for the presumption in Regulation 16. Compliance is judged against the requirements in Schedule 1, and meeting a standard is evidence that you meet them.

EN 301 549 is the European standard the whole system is built around, and its version numbers need care.

The version cited in the Official Journal 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 for information only. ETSI, the European standards body that publishes it, published V4.1.1 on 2 September 2026, and its clause 9 moves to WCAG 2.2. ETSI publishing it is not the same as the Commission citing it in the Official Journal. As at 30 September 2026, it gives no presumption of conformity under either Directive, and will not until the Commission cites it.

For the Irish public sector, the position is different, and the law does lead to a standard. S.I. No. 358 of 2020 gives a presumption of conformity for harmonised standards. 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 version, published as a Recommendation by W3C, the body that sets web standards. It added nine success criteria (the individual tests) to WCAG 2.1 and removed one, 4.1.1 Parsing. That one is marked obsolete because assistive technology, such as screen readers, no longer reads the page's 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: 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. A count of 56 includes the heading the specification keeps for the removed criterion.

WCAG 3.0 is a Working Draft, the latest dated 10 September 2026. It has no legal status anywhere and no date attached to it. Treat any quotation of its requirements as speculation.

These failures stop somebody completing a transaction.

The first is the AI disclosure. If you have added a chatbot, Article 50(5) of the AI Act requires the disclosure to be clear and distinguishable, and to meet the accessibility requirements that apply. A disclosure that only appears when the mouse hovers over something (a tooltip) can easily be missed, and the Commission's Article 50 guidelines say that is not clear and distinguishable. Text inside an image needs a text alternative before a screen reader can read it. The Article 50 duties are set out separately.

The second is the assessment. If you decide that a requirement would be a disproportionate burden, Regulation 15 of S.I. 636/2023 requires that decision to be an assessment you can produce. It has to be renewed at least every five years. Under Regulation 15(8), you cannot rely on it at all if you have received outside funding to improve accessibility.

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 document to keep is a dated audit against WCAG 2.1 AA, listing the failures and dating each fix. It shows the four Schedule 1 qualities were taken seriously, and it is what you would hand to the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC) or to a consumer's solicitor.

A consumer can go straight to the Circuit Court under Regulation 30 without any regulator involved, and the audit is the document you would produce there.