Accessibility Beyond the Widget

The official angular-developer skill's angular-aria.md covers nine widget patterns - Accordion, Listbox, Combobox, Menu, Tabs, Toolbar, Tree, Grid - with their ARIA attributes, arrow-key navigation, roving tabindex and focus within the component. Its own framing is that its directives handle the accessibility logic while you supply structure and styling.

This skill owns everything outside a single widget, which is where conformance is actually won or lost: what happens between components, across navigations, and at the level of the page.

What this skill does not own

1. Establish the target before giving guidance. Which WCAG version and level is being claimed (2.1 AA and 2.2 AA differ by six A and AA criteria), the Angular major, and whether @angular/cdk is a dependency. Advice that assumes the CDK is wrong without it.
2. This skill owns only what is outside one widget. Never restate the nine patterns. If a claim is about the internals of a single component, it belongs to angular-developer.
3. An automated tool cannot tell you whether you conform. Verified on axe-core 4.13.0: 105 rules, of which 30 map to no WCAG criterion at all, and exactly one maps to a criterion new in WCAG 2.2. There is no rule for live regions, reflow, dragging movements, consistent help or accessible authentication. Treat a clean axe run as the floor, never the verdict. See automated-testing.md.
4. Use @angular/cdk/a11y rather than hand-rolling. LiveAnnouncer, FocusTrap, InteractivityChecker, FocusMonitor and AriaDescriber all exist and are tested. A hand-written focus trap will miss inert, shadow DOM, and the case where the trap's own contents change.
5. Focus after a route change is your job, and nothing warns you. Angular's router ships configurable scroll restoration and no focus API whatsoever. See route-change-focus.md.
6. Test keyboard first, then a screen reader, then automation. In that order, because the first two find what the third cannot see, and the third is the only one that can run in CI.

Every reference carries a ## Version notes section stating what differs across Angular 19 to 21, @angular/cdk versions and WCAG 2.1 to 2.2, and a ## Gotchas list of the specific mistakes agents make in that area. Read the gotchas even when skimming. Where a claim is computable it has been computed: the contrast ratios and the axe rule counts are program output.

Determining the target

Step 1. The claim. Ask which standard is being conformed to. "Accessible" is not a target; "WCAG 2.2 AA" is. For UK public-facing services this is usually 2.2 AA, and the Equality Act 2010 duty is on the outcome rather than on a version.

Step 2. package.json for @angular/core and whether @angular/cdk is present. Without the CDK, live announcements and focus traps have to be written by hand, and the guidance changes.

Step 3. Whether an automated check already runs in CI, and with which ruleset. A project running axe with only the default tags is not checking the same things as one running wcag22aa.

Step 4. Whether the application is server-rendered. Hydration changes when focus can be moved, because the element may not exist during the first render.

Topics

• Automated testing and its limits: what axe actually covers, measured rule by rule, what it cannot see, and the manual checks that replace the missing coverage. Read automated-testing.md
• Focus across route changes: the router's missing focus API, where focus goes by default, skip links, and announcing the new page. Read route-change-focus.md
• Colour and contrast: the ratios, computed, including the one-hex-digit difference between passing and failing, non-text contrast, and never encoding meaning in colour alone. Read colour-and-contrast.md
• Form errors: the three associations that make a validation failure perceivable, the Angular trap of a dangling aria-describedby, error summaries, and announcing exactly once. Read form-errors.md
• What WCAG 2.2 added: the nine new criteria, the one that was removed, and the five new manual checks that come with moving a claim from 2.1 AA. Read wcag22-criteria.md

Symptom index

Checklist

• Accessibility review checklist: 38 rules for a review pass over an existing application, the five most damaging first, each linked to its reference. Read checklist.md