The 6 new WCAG 2.2 criteria your online shop should check today (EAA compliance checklist)

EAA Comply · Updated July 2026 · 9 min read

WCAG 2.2 was published as a W3C Recommendation in October 2023. It adds nine new success criteria on top of WCAG 2.1 and removes one obsolete one (4.1.1 Parsing, which no longer makes sense in modern browsers). Of those nine additions, six sit at level AA — the level that matters for compliance work, since AAA is aspirational and rarely required in practice.

The current EU/EAA legal baseline, EN 301 549, still centers on WCAG 2.1 AA. If your shop passes 2.1 AA today, you are not out of compliance by ignoring 2.2. But 2.2 AA is a strict superset of 2.1 AA — meeting 2.2 AA automatically means you meet 2.1 AA too — and it's clearly where the standard, and eventually EN 301 549, is heading. Auditing against the new criteria now is cheap insurance: the fixes are small (spacing, an extra checkbox, a non-drag alternative) and far easier to build in from the start than to retrofit after a regulator or a lawsuit forces the issue.

The 6 new AA criteria, ranked by how often they actually show up in e-commerce audits

Not all six are equally common. Three show up in almost every online shop we scan; the other three matter but depend more on what specific interactions your site uses. Fix in this order.

• 2.4.11 Focus Not Obscured (Minimum). When an element receives keyboard focus, at least part of it must remain visible — not fully hidden behind another layer.
• 2.5.8 Target Size (Minimum). Interactive targets need to be at least 24×24 CSS pixels, unless spaced apart or otherwise exempt.
• 3.3.7 Redundant Entry. Information the user already entered in the same process shouldn't have to be re-typed, unless re-entry is essential.
• 2.5.7 Dragging Movements. Anything operated by dragging needs a single-pointer alternative that doesn't require dragging.
• 3.2.6 Consistent Help. If a help mechanism appears on multiple pages, it must stay in the same relative order each time.
• 3.3.8 Accessible Authentication (Minimum). Login and account creation can't rely solely on a cognitive function test (remembering a password, solving a puzzle, transcribing a CAPTCHA) with no alternative.

1. Focus Not Obscured (Minimum) — 2.4.11

This is one of the most common new failures we find, because it's caused by exactly the kind of UI pattern every modern shop uses: sticky headers, cookie banners, and chat widgets that stack on top of the page content.

E-commerce example: a customer tabs through your product-listing filters. A sticky "Add to basket" bar or a persistent cookie banner sits fixed at the bottom of the viewport and fully covers the focused filter checkbox as it scrolls into that zone. A sighted keyboard user has no way to see what's currently focused — they're navigating blind. The fix is usually a few lines of CSS: reserve scroll-margin / scroll-padding space so focused elements scroll clear of fixed-position overlays, or use position: sticky with enough offset that focus rings never sit fully underneath a chat widget or promo bar.

2. Dragging Movements — 2.5.7

E-commerce example: product image galleries with swipe/drag-to-advance carousels, quantity sliders, or a "reorder your saved items" drag-and-drop cart. Anyone who can't perform a precise drag gesture — due to a motor impairment, or simply because they're using a switch device or screen-reader touch exploration — needs an equivalent way to do the same thing with taps or clicks: visible prev/next arrows on the gallery, numeric +/- buttons alongside the slider, or up/down move buttons instead of drag-only reordering. This one applies less universally than the other two "high" items above — plenty of shops don't use drag interactions at all — but if you do have a gallery or slider, it's an easy miss.

3. Target Size (Minimum) — 2.5.8

Also extremely common, because product pages are full of small, densely-packed controls.

E-commerce example: color and size swatches rendered as 16×16px div-based buttons, or tiny quantity +/- buttons squeezed next to a stepper input. Under 2.5.8 these need to be at least 24×24 CSS pixels (or have enough spacing from neighbouring targets, or fall under a documented exception like inline text links). This is a design-system-level fix — once you widen the touch/click target in your swatch and stepper components, it propagates across every product page at once, which is exactly why it's worth fixing early rather than page by page.

4. Consistent Help — 3.2.6

E-commerce example: a live-chat bubble that sits bottom-right on the homepage and product pages, but gets pushed to a different position — or disappears into a footer link — on the checkout page, because checkout was built by a different team or plugin. Under 3.2.6, if you offer a help mechanism (chat, contact link, phone number, help page link) across multiple pages, it needs to appear in the same relative order relative to other page content every time, so users who rely on consistent location — including many people with cognitive disabilities — can find it without re-searching each page. It's less universal than target size or focus issues (some shops genuinely don't repeat a help link site-wide) but worth a five-minute check across your main journey: home → category → product → cart → checkout.

5. Redundant Entry — 3.3.7

Another very common one, because checkout flows are exactly where redundant data entry piles up.

E-commerce example: the classic failure is a billing-address step that makes the customer manually retype a shipping address they entered thirty seconds earlier, instead of offering a "same as shipping address" checkbox. The same applies to email re-entered for a newsletter opt-in, or a phone number asked for twice across guest checkout and delivery instructions. The fix is almost always a UX one, not a technical one: auto-fill or offer a copy-from-previous-step checkbox for anything the user already gave you in the same process. This directly affects completion rates too, which makes it one of the easier fixes to get budget for.

6. Accessible Authentication (Minimum) — 3.3.8

E-commerce example: a guest-checkout or account-login step that gates the user behind a visual CAPTCHA (distorted text, "select all the traffic lights") with no audio option, alternative, or way to bypass it — or a 2FA flow that only works via a code you must transcribe with no copy-paste or autofill support. 3.3.8 doesn't ban CAPTCHAs or passwords outright; it requires that the process not rely purely on a cognitive function test unless there's an alternative method, assistance, or a mechanism like a password manager / copy-paste isn't blocked. This tends to matter most for sites with a login-gated checkout rather than fully open guest checkout, so its frequency varies more than the other five.

Where this fits with the rest of your compliance work

This article deliberately covers only what's new in 2.2. For the foundational items — contrast, alt text, labelled forms, full keyboard operability — see our online shop accessibility checklist, and for a deeper explanation of each 2.1 AA criterion and why it exists, see WCAG 2.1 AA explained. If you're still mapping out whether the EAA applies to your business at all, start with the European Accessibility Act guide for online shops.

Want a first read on where your site stands against either version of the standard? Run our free accessibility scan — it flags real code-level issues from an actual axe-core scan, not a cosmetic overlay check.

• Sources:
• W3C, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2, W3C Recommendation
• W3C WAI, WCAG 2.2 supplemental guidance
• Deque Systems, accessibility engineering blog