Website accessibility gets a boost with ACT 1.1

Website accessibility gets a boost with ACT 1.1

Knowledge

March 25, 2026

The W3C Accessibility Guidelines Working Group released their Accessibility Conformance Testing (ACT) Rules format 1.1 last month. This document, currently tagged as a recommendation, beefs up rules structures, categorizes rules as Conformance or Secondary, and mandates plain language among other changes.

What are the Accessibility Conformance Testing rules?

The easiest way to understand what the ACT rules are is to take a look for yourself. Check those out at the link below:

https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/act/rules/

There you’ll see the familiar WCAG guidelines organized into a list filterable by WCAG specification (level A, AA, etc.), status (approved vs. proposed), and implementation type (manual vs. automated). Within each of the rules are multiple methods for testing the rule. Each method has a dedicated page with detailed instructions on what to look for and how to test.

Why are the ACT rules important?

In the early days of compliance testing, different software packages aimed at addressing website accessibility would have slightly different takes on how to interpret WCAG rules resulting in inconsistent results between platforms.

While much of that difference has diminished over time, the ACT rules further crystallize exactly how the W3C expects guidelines to be tested and interpreted. This will increase auditing accuracy for all accessibility testing platforms.

What the ACT rules don’t do

The ACT Rules are great for clarifying how to test the WCAG guidelines, but they do not comprehensively determine if a website at large is compliant. The rules only look for specific kinds of failures (albeit common ones) that would disqualify a related bit of code/UI from being compliant. Passing all of those tests for a guideline doesn’t necessarily mean it has been satisfied—there are other ways to fail outside of what these rules test for.

The WCAG guidelines still remain the source of truth on pass/fail scenarios and the ACT rules are just supporting resources for understanding and using the guidelines.

How this impacts our audits

Harmonic Northwest offers website accessibility auditing and remediation as a service. Our focus is more on the manual testing side of things—in other words, the parts of accessibility testing that are currently out of reach of automated testing. As such, we’ll be keeping a close eye on updates to the manual and semi-manual categories of the ACT rules and ensuring that our testing processes follow the best practices listed there. We’ll also keep tabs on the suite of tools we use for automated tests to make sure they are keeping up with these rules.