"WCAG 2.2 AA compliant" gets thrown around a lot. Here's what it actually means for a restaurant website — no legalese, no 80-page PDF.

WCAG stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Version 2.2 is the current one. Level AA is the tier courts and regulators point to. It boils down to one question: can a guest who is blind, low-vision, deaf, or navigating by keyboard actually use your site — read your menu, find your hours, book a table?

Why this lands on restaurants specifically

The numbers, from Accessibility.com's year-end reports: website accessibility lawsuits against food and beverage businesses jumped 82% in a single year (2023), and as of 2024 restaurants are the single most-targeted business category. More than 72% of these cases target New York businesses — this is a New York problem first. A handful of law firms file more than 69% of all of them, and dealing with one costs an estimated $25,000 — before you've fixed a single thing on the site.

That's context, not a scare tactic: the standard below is the same standard either way, and meeting it costs a fraction of the letter. But it's worth knowing the landscape you're operating in — and that more than 95% of websites currently fail it, which is exactly why the firms keep filing.

Your menu

This is the big one. If your menu is a photo or a PDF, a screen reader can't read it. The requirement: your dishes, descriptions, and prices must be real text, with headings and structure a screen reader can navigate. A guest using assistive tech should be able to jump straight to "Mains" the same way a sighted guest's eye does.

Your photos

Every photo that carries meaning needs alt text — a short written description. "Dining room at dusk" works. "IMG_4032.jpg" doesn't. Decorative images get marked as decorative so screen readers skip them instead of guessing.

Your reservation and order forms

Every field needs a label that assistive tech announces. Errors need to be explained in text, not just a red outline. If a guest misses the phone-number field, the site should say so — in words — and move their keyboard focus there.

Your colors and text

Text needs a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 against its background. That pale gray script font over a marble texture fails. So does white text on a sunlit patio photo. This trips up more restaurant sites than almost anything else — it even tripped up two of ours, until our own scan caught it and we fixed the theme builder.

Your keyboard guests

Everything on your site — the nav, the menu, the booking form — must work with a keyboard alone, in a sensible order, with a visible focus indicator. New in 2.2: nothing focused can be hidden behind a sticky header, and dragging (like a swipe-only gallery) must have a tap alternative.

What this means in practice

You can read the full breakdown in our accessibility guide, check the rules we build every Remi site to, or run a free scan and see where your current site stands — it takes about a minute.

Every Remi site is built and tested to WCAG 2.2 AA from the start, so none of this is your homework. But whether you're on Remi or not, this list is the standard — and now you know what it actually asks for.