This is a transcript of the video How many WCAG 2.1 success criteria are there?.
(David Berman appears on screen in front of a shared screen showing PowerPoint slides and faces the camera for the duration of this video. David is wearing a black jacket with a blue shirt and tie.)
WCAG 2.1 contains everything in WCAG 2.0, and just adds some additional success criteria. So earlier I was saying WCAG 2.0 AA for example is made up of 25 level A’s and 13 AA’s. So for a total of 38 success criteria. So WCAG 2.1
simply added more success criteria and left all of the wording of WCAG 2.0 intact. Even the things that weren’t well written are still exactly intact. So all the knowledge you may have of WCAG 2.0 or all the compatibility you’ve built into your products to make them WCAG 2.0 AA compliant, if someone’s now saying, “Ah, but wait, now you got to upgrade to 2.1.” The good news is everything you’ve done so far is still useful and important and we’re just adding a bit more. So let me clarify that I’m showing a venn diagram on my screen now which demonstrates that whereas WCAG 2.0 AA conformance involved 38 success criteria. WCAG 2.1 simply adds 12 more. And the reason I say that is because WCAG 2.1 added five level A’s and seven level AA’s. So that’s 12 more things you need to have to say hey my product isn’t just WCAG 2.0 AA conformant,
It’s also 2.1 AA conformant. So now 30 38 + 12 more is 50. So we now have an even 50 success criteria to conform to WCAG 2.1 AA. And for many of your products, for many documents, many of those 12 don’t even apply.