WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines)

WCAG organizes its requirements around four principles — content must be Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust (often abbreviated POUR) — covering practical requirements like sufficient color contrast, keyboard-only navigation, descriptive alt text for images, captions for video, and forms that clearly announce errors to screen readers. WCAG has three conformance levels: A (minimum), AA (the level almost universally required by law and by clients, covering the large majority of real accessibility barriers), and AAA (the strictest, rarely required in full since some AAA criteria are impractical for certain content types). The current widely-adopted version is WCAG 2.1 or 2.2, with 2.2 adding requirements around focus visibility and target size.

For GCC businesses, WCAG 2.1 AA is the practical target for two overlapping reasons: it is the technical benchmark referenced by regulations like the EU's EAA and Saudi Arabia's own accessibility standards for government and public-facing digital services, and it is simply good practice — an accessible site also tends to have cleaner semantic HTML, better mobile usability, and stronger SEO, since search engines and screen readers both rely on well-structured markup. A WCAG audit typically combines automated scanning (which catches roughly a third of issues, like missing alt text or contrast failures) with manual testing using an actual screen reader and keyboard-only navigation, since most real barriers only surface that way.