Your Site Passes WCAG 2.1. Courts Want 2.2.

Your legal team signed off on a WCAG 2.1 AA audit last year. The vendor sent the report, the flagged issues got fixed, and the file went in a drawer. Then a demand letter shows up citing failures the audit never tested for — a mobile checkout button too small to tap reliably, a product image carousel that only works by dragging, a login screen with no way past a puzzle CAPTCHA if you can’t complete it. None of that is in WCAG 2.1. All of it is in WCAG 2.2, and that’s the version plaintiffs’ firms and settlement negotiators are citing now.

There’s No Law That Names Either Version — For You

The Department of Justice extended ADA Title II web-accessibility compliance deadlines on April 20, 2026: large public entities now have until April 26, 2027, smaller ones until April 26, 2028. That rule names WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the technical standard. It’s useful context, and it’s also irrelevant to most US ecommerce brands, because Title II covers state and local government — not private business.

Private businesses fall under Title III, and Title III has never had a codified web-accessibility regulation or a compliance deadline. That’s not a loophole. It means the obligation has been in force since the ADA itself, and nobody is waiting on a rule to “catch up” before enforcement starts. The absence of a named standard is exactly why lawsuits reference whichever version of WCAG a plaintiff’s expert judges to be current best practice — and since October 2023, that’s been 2.2, not 2.1.

WCAG 2.2 Is the De Facto Standard, Not the Legal One

WCAG 2.2 became the W3C recommendation in October 2023. It’s backward compatible with 2.1 — meeting 2.2 automatically satisfies 2.1 — which is why most accessibility consultancies now audit against 2.2 by default. The problem is that a lot of audits performed before late 2023, or performed since by a vendor that never updated its checklist, are still testing against 2.1 alone. Nine success criteria sit in that gap.

The Five That Hit Checkout and Login Directly

Target Size (Minimum). Tap targets — including “Add to Cart,” quantity steppers, and payment-method buttons — need to be at least 24×24 CSS pixels, or have adequate spacing from neighboring targets. Mobile checkout flows built on dense, desktop-first grids fail this constantly.

Dragging Movements. Any interaction that requires a drag gesture — image galleries, before/after sliders, quantity sliders — needs a single-pointer alternative, like tap-to-advance arrows. A carousel that only responds to a swipe fails outright.

Accessible Authentication. Login and account-creation flows can’t rely solely on a cognitive function test — a puzzle CAPTCHA, a memorized security question — with no alternative path. Password managers and copy-paste have to work.

Redundant Entry. If a checkout flow already has the shipping address, it can’t force a shopper to retype it for billing without an autofill or reuse option, unless re-entry is essential (re-entering a password to confirm it, for example, is still allowed).

Consistent Help. If a help or contact mechanism — a chat widget, a phone number, a support link — appears on one page of a multi-step flow, it has to appear in the same relative order on every other page of that flow.

The Lawsuit Data Doesn’t Distinguish Versions — Your Audit Should

WebAIM’s annual accessibility analysis of the top million home pages found 95.9% had at least one detectable WCAG failure, averaging 56.8 errors per page — and that’s testing against automated checks alone, which catch a minority of real issues since criteria like dragging movements and accessible authentication require manual interaction testing, not a markup scan. Federal Title III web-accessibility lawsuit filings hit 3,117 in 2025, a 27% increase over 2024, according to an April 2026 accessibility-compliance analysis by Astriata. None of that filing volume sorts itself by WCAG version — it just accumulates against whichever standard the plaintiff’s expert cites, and in 2026 that’s increasingly 2.2.

Why This Hits B2B and Wholesale Portals Harder

Login-gated B2B and wholesale reorder portals often skip accessibility work entirely, on the assumption that a portal behind a login isn’t public-facing in the way Title III cares about. That assumption is wrong — a login gate doesn’t exempt a commercial website from Title III — and it’s a worse gap than it looks, because two of WCAG 2.2’s new criteria land squarely on portal workflows: accessible authentication (every wholesale portal has a login), and redundant entry (every reorder flow that pre-fills a previous order and then asks the buyer to re-confirm shipping and billing separately).

What a Real Audit Covers That an Overlay Widget Doesn’t

An accessibility overlay widget patches the rendered DOM at runtime — it can adjust contrast or add ARIA labels on the fly, but it can’t restructure a drag-only carousel into a single-pointer interaction, and it can’t rewrite an authentication flow that has no fallback to a puzzle CAPTCHA. Those are interaction-pattern problems, not markup-attribute problems, and they require changes in the code that renders the page, not a script that runs after it loads.

Does a WCAG 2.1 AA audit still clear ADA risk in 2026?

No. WCAG 2.2, published in October 2023, added nine success criteria — including target size, dragging movements, and accessible authentication — that plaintiffs’ firms and settlement negotiators now treat as the practical benchmark, even though no US law names either version for private businesses.

Fixing the Gap Before It’s a Demand Letter

MnT Future audits against WCAG 2.2 AA using real interaction testing on checkout, login, and carousel flows — not a scanner report and not a widget — and remediates through the same design system running the rest of the storefront, so the fix doesn’t drift out of sync with the next release. That’s the same process behind our own WCAG 2.2 AA case study, seven failing checks taken to zero across nine key pages, no overlay widget involved. If your last audit predates late 2023, or you’re not sure which version it tested against, that’s the first thing worth checking before a demand letter checks it for you.

Book a free strategy session and we’ll tell you, plainly, which of the nine criteria your current storefront or wholesale portal is missing.