W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2 approved as ISO/IEC international standard
https://www.w3.org/ — 21 October 2025 — W3C standard Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 has been approved by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) - International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) Joint Technical Committee (JTC 1) - Information technology as ISO/IEC 40500:2025.
The WCAG 2 standard focuses on making content more accessible to people with disabilities, including auditory, cognitive, neurological, physical, speech, and visual disabilities. It also covers making content more usable by older users with changing abilities due to aging and improves usability for all users.
WCAG 2.2 was processed through JTC 1 as a Publicly Available Specification (PAS). ISO/IEC 40500:2025 is available free from the ISO website.
"ISO/IEC JTC 1 is pleased to provide this updated W3C accessibility standard as ISO/IEC 40500:2025. This standard will enable the internet to be more accessible for everyone, building on W3C’s pioneering work on web accessibility," said Phil Wennblom, Chair of ISO/IEC JTC 1.
Since WCAG 2 was first published in 2008, it has been adopted and referenced by many governments and organizations. Publication of ISO/IEC 40500:2025 enables more countries to formally adopt WCAG 2.2.
"W3C coordinates with organizations around the world to provide a standard that can be applied in different countries and contexts," said Shawn Lawton Henry, Director of the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). "In addition to ISO/IEC 40500:2025, WCAG is used in EN 301 549, for the European Accessibility Act (EAA), and other laws."
ISO/IEC 40500:2025 is the October 2023 version of WCAG 2.2. W3C is working to get ISO/IEC 40500 and EN 301 549 updated with the latest version of WCAG 2.2.
The WCAG standard is created through the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). Along with WCAG, WAI provides a range of supporting resources including WCAG Techniques, How to Meet WCAG (Quick Reference), What's New in WCAG 2.2, and translations. For an introduction to WCAG and links to these supporting resources, see the WCAG 2 Overview.
About the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
The mission of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is to make the web work — for everyone. W3C offers a unique platform for creating and maintaining a broad range of technical standards and guidelines that enable a World Wide Web which connects and empowers humanity.
W3C convenes hundreds of member organizations, thousands of dedicated technologists and the broad global community, who together shape the future of web technologies, advancing the benefits that accessibility, internationalization, security, and privacy bring to the web and everyone who uses it.
W3C standards enable people and businesses on the web to address society’s social, cultural and economic needs by ensuring an open, accessible, and interoperable web. Some examples are WCAG, SVG, WebRTC, and HTML and CSS, two of the foundational technologies upon which websites are built.
W3C’s work is created in the open and provided for free under the groundbreaking W3C Patent Policy that ensures web standards can be implemented and used widely without complex licensing or costly royalties, which in turn helps to foster open development, and supports the web's growth as a common global infrastructure for all.
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End Press Release
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