Conformance Level

Accessibility doesn't split into met and not met. There are dozens of criteria, each differing in difficulty and in how many people it affects, so the sentence "we followed accessibility" leaves no way to check what was actually done.

Contracts that said only "must comply with accessibility" produced a fight at every review. The vendor points out that images have alt text describing them in words, so the requirement is met. The buyer expected the brightness gap between text and background to have been handled too. Both positions have grounds, nothing resolves, and the meeting turns into reading the guideline aloud criterion by criterion.

Conformance levels removed that by sorting dozens of criteria into three named bundles. Write AA on one line of the contract and how far the work has to go is settled.

The three levels sort criteria by difficulty and by reach.

1. A covers criteria that, left undone, make the product unusable for some group entirely. Alt text on images, and reaching every function through keyboard navigation without a mouse, belong here.
2. AA is the line teams actually target. Body text at a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1, and content that doesn't get cut off when text is enlarged to 200 percent, are the representative criteria. Most public procurement and most national accessibility law use this level as the bar.
3. AAA asks for the same things more strictly — contrast climbs to 7 to 1. Some of its criteria are hard to apply everywhere, so it rarely becomes a product-wide target and tends to get applied to specific screens.

Levels accumulate. Claiming AA means every A criterion is met as well. Judgment happens per screen and it's pass or fail: meet 29 of 30 AA criteria on a screen and that screen is A, not AA.

"This tender requires AA, so we need to audit every contrast ratio."

The level the contract demands is fixed, so every criterion at that level has to be checked.

"Does this screen need to reach AAA? Let's hold it at AA and move on."

A judgment that the cost of the stricter level doesn't pay off on this particular screen.

"What we have now is A, not AA. The list gets clipped when you zoom in."

Pointing out that one missing criterion dropped the level by a step.

At Pagedeck, AA arrived as a contract term when Sofia brought in a public-sector tender. Noa audited the eighteen main screens and found alt text and keyboard operation mostly in place; what failed was body text in gray at a contrast ratio of 3.1 to 1, and the document list clipping when zoomed. Fixing those two took two weeks, and without those two weeks the tender was closed to Pagedeck entirely.