This is all very good news, of course. It means there is effectively no change to the UK Regulations - full WCAG compliance continues to be required by the PSBAR, as before. It means that progressive universities and colleges, that have active PSBAR compliance projects running, can continue improvements for their disabled students as they already have in progress or have planned.

Just one point: the requirement to move to WCAG 2.2 is already present in the legislation, since it requires compliance ".....to Level A and AA Success Criteria as set out in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium, as amended from time to time." That last phrase (see https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2022/1097/made) will take effect the moment the final version of WCAG 2.2 is published, expected in early 2023. So, web developers, accessibility testers, and accessibility managers at all institutions will want to familiarise themselves with the additional WCAG 2.2 criteria (7 new ones on top of the existing WCAG 2.1), and start implementing them in their work.

Meanwhile, universities that are ignoring the law (of which there are far too many), allowing their staff to continue creating inaccessible content unchecked, are falling further behind and continue to accumulate more technical debt with every new web page they publish!

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