When are custom thresholds worth it for Meets WCAG accessibility criteria?
When are custom thresholds warranted?
Set `wcagLevel` to `A` when you are establishing a floor on a large legacy template estate and need a triage pass before committing to AA. Set it to `AAA` for a specific high-obligation template, accepting that link-purpose and other stricter criteria come into play. Enable entries in `enabledPolicyChecks` when your organisation wants findings beyond WCAG — house rules about readability or structure — and extend `logoPatterns` if your brand assets are named in a way the defaults would not recognise as a logotype.
When should you stay on Standard?
Stay on AA in almost every case, because it is the level the law references and therefore the level a result is worth citing at. Keep `enabledPolicyChecks` empty when the output is intended as accessibility evidence, so every finding maps to a success criterion and none of them are house preferences wearing WCAG's authority. Leave `ambiguousLinkPhrases` alone unless you are actually running at AAA, where it is the only level that consults it.
What do you trade away?
Dropping to A produces a cleaner report that means less, and it is easy for a triage setting to become the permanent one nobody revisited. Running at AAA generates findings W3C explicitly does not recommend as a blanket policy, which can crowd out the AA failures that actually carry obligations. Enabling policy checks mixes two kinds of finding in one verdict, so a reader cannot tell a legal criterion from a house rule unless you separate them — and extending `logoPatterns` too broadly exempts real content from contrast judgement, which quietly weakens the check.
Community Standard vs org Custom
The Standard configuration is a transcription of published standards and their own guidance about levels, which is what makes an AA result citable outside your organisation. Policy checks are the opposite — yours, with no external authority — so keep them clearly labelled as such wherever the output is used as evidence. Because the check abstains rather than guessing, the governance question that matters is who picks up the abstentions: a pass with unread abstentions is not an accessibility review, it is half of one.
Worked override examples
A public-sector supplier keeps `wcagLevel` at `AA` and reports abstentions to its accessibility reviewer, using the check to narrow human effort rather than replace it. A team triaging two hundred legacy templates runs at `A` first to find the worst, then re-runs the survivors at `AA` before certifying them. An organisation with internal readability rules enables specific `enabledPolicyChecks` on its own template audits while keeping them off the runs whose output goes into a compliance file.
How does an agent call it with parameters?
{
"type": "email",
"validations": [
{
"id": "email-accessibility",
"parameters": {
"wcagLevel": "AA",
"ambiguousLinkPhrases": [
"click here",
"here",
"read more",
"more",
"learn more",
"this",
"link",
"details",
"continue"
],
"logoPatterns": [
"logo",
"wordmark",
"brandmark"
],
"enabledPolicyChecks": []
}
}
]
}