Does my site meet WCAG? What bernard checks against the standard
WCAG stands for the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. It is the standard for accessible websites, written by the W3C, the body that looks after the web’s shared rules. The current version is 2.2. It is organised as numbered rules (“success criteria”) at three levels: A, AA and AAA. When a client, a council or an insurer asks “is the site WCAG compliant?”, they nearly always mean level AA of the current version.
The prompt
“Does my site meet accessibility standards?”
Signed in, Get my prompt fills in your site for you. Otherwise press Copy and fill in the [bracketed] parts. First time? Connect your AI to bernard once: Use your own AI (opens in a new tab).
This page says what bernard does and does not do about it, in that order.
Ask for it
You do not have to type any of this. Open your site, go to Edit with AI, and pick the starter card Accessibility standards check, on the Getting found tab. It asks the question for you: Does my site meet accessibility standards?
What follows is one run: your pages are opened in a real browser and tested rule by rule, every problem the tools can fix is fixed on a preview, the ones that need you are described rather than changed, the check is run again on the same pages so you can see the before and the after, and you are left with a dated record of what was looked at, what was fixed and what remains. Nothing goes live until you approve it.
What bernard checks today
Ask your AI to check the site and it sweeps every page for the problems a machine can be certain about, and loads your busiest pages in a real phone-sized browser for two more. Each finding maps to a WCAG rule:
| bernard looks for | WCAG rule |
|---|---|
| Images with no description | 1.1.1 Non-text content |
| No main heading, or heading levels that skip | 1.3.1 Info and relationships, 2.4.6 Headings and labels |
| Text too faint against its background | 1.4.3 Contrast (minimum) |
| Links that only say “read more” or “click here” | 2.4.4 Link purpose |
| Buttons and links too small to tap on a phone | 2.5.8 Target size (minimum), new in 2.2 |
| Form fields with no label, or a hint the field is not linked to | 3.3.2 Labels or instructions |
| Buttons and controls with no name a screen reader can say | 4.1.2 Name, role, value |
| Menu buttons that point at a menu that does not exist | 4.1.2 Name, role, value |
| A role written onto an element that already has it, or “hidden” set on something a keyboard can still reach | 4.1.2 Name, role, value |
| The same id used twice on one page | Dropped from 2.2 as a rule, still breaks screen readers, still fixed |
That is a real slice of the standard, not the whole of it. Rules a machine cannot judge, such as whether an image description is truthful, whether the reading order makes sense, or whether the site works from the keyboard alone through a retained menu script, are not on this list.
What bernard fixes for you
Of the findings above, the mechanical ones are fixed on a preview for you to approve: a menu button repaired so it points at its menu, a redundant role removed, a hint linked to its field, a duplicate id renamed, a contrast pair moved to a passing colour. The ones that need a human decision, such as what a picture shows or where a link should say it goes, are drafted from the page and shown to you. You approve every change before it goes live, and you can put any of it back (see Put it back how it was).
Some of the standard is met before you do anything, because bernard’s own pages are built that way: the course and shop pages, the forms, the learner area and the cookie banner carry their names, roles and states already. Nothing to check there.
What bernard will not say
bernard will not call your site “WCAG compliant”, and it will not put a badge on it. One automated pass cannot earn that, and a claim that is wrong is worse for you than no claim.
The check driven by the standard itself now exists. Ask your AI to check your site against WCAG and it opens your pages in a real browser, at phone width or desktop width, and tests them against the rules of WCAG 2.2 at levels A and AA. What comes back is organised by rule number, not as a score: each rule that fails, what it means in plain words, which pages and which part of the page, and what bernard can do about it. It finishes with one of three sentences. Two of them are limited to the pages it looked at: either it met the AA rules a machine can test on those pages, or it did not, and how many rules failed on how many pages. The third says that nothing could be checked, because none of your pages would open. That one is not a result, and bernard says so. Because a browser has to open each page, it looks at a few of your pages by default and can be asked to go through the rest.
That is still your own assessment of your own site, made with a good tool. It is not a certificate, and it is not the whole standard: no automated check can tell you whether a picture’s description is truthful or whether the page makes sense read aloud in order.
What the audit says
The three things that were planned here have shipped, and the whole of it is now an audit rather than a check. The automated pass runs on its own once a week, on your home page, the pages you have changed since the last run and a sample of the rest, at phone and desktop widths. Ask your AI for the check any time you want an answer sooner than the next weekly run. bernard walks you through eight questions no machine can answer, keeps your answers with your name and the date, and marks an answer as needing a fresh look when you change the page it was about. Out of that comes a dated report you can send someone, and an accessibility statement page on your own site that rewrites itself on every publish.
That audit ends in one of four words: conforms, partially conforms, does not conform, or not yet assessed. The word never travels without the list of what is outstanding that produced it, and “compliant” is still not one of the four. The whole of it, including the eight questions and what the report does and does not say, is in Get an accessibility audit for my website.
If you have been asked for evidence
Use the Accessibility standards check card. The record it writes is exactly this: what was looked at, what was fixed and when, what remains and why. Say yes when it offers to go on, and you get the eight questions, the dated report and the statement page as well. That is a dated record of work done against the standard’s rules, which is what most people asking actually need. It is not a certificate, and bernard does not certify.
The rules people cite
Two laws are usually behind the question. Read them, or ask someone who advises you, before deciding what applies to you; bernard does not give legal advice.
- The European Accessibility Act, Directive (EU) 2019/882, in force for new products and services from 28 June 2025: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2019/882/oj
- The UK Equality Act 2010, which places a duty on service providers without naming a web standard: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15
And the standard itself, from the W3C: https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG22/
The practical checks live in Is my site easy for everyone to use?, Make my site work with screen readers, Write good alt text for my images and Fix text that’s hard to read.
Headings that skip levels are the most common gap of all, and keeping the page structure tidy fixes them.
Questions people ask
- Can bernard tell me my site is WCAG compliant?
- No, and no honest tool can. bernard tests your pages in a real browser against the rules of WCAG 2.2 at levels A and AA and answers rule by rule, fixing what it can on a preview you approve and listing the rest, and it runs that pass once a week. On top of it there is a full audit: the eight questions no machine can answer, a dated report, and a statement page that keeps itself true. All of that is your own assessment made with a good tool. It is not a certificate, and bernard does not certify.
- Someone asked me for an accessibility statement. What can I give them today?
- A statement page on your own site, at /accessibility/, in the shape the EU and UK model statements use: where you stand, what is outstanding, how and when it was assessed, and how somebody reports a problem. Ask your AI for it, read it, and approve it like any other page. It rewrites itself on every publish, so it does not go stale. The whole of it, including the eight questions, is on the ‘Get an accessibility audit’ page.
- Do I have to do this by law?
- It depends where you sell and to whom. Some rules point at WCAG; the two most often cited are linked at the end of this page. bernard does not give legal advice; it makes the site better for real people and gives you the record.
- What is the difference between A, AA and AAA?
- Three levels of the same standard. A is the floor, AA is what most organisations aim for and what regulators usually name, AAA is the stretch. bernard’s checks sit in A and AA.