# WCAG 3 Status Check: A Complete Rundown of the March 2026 Draft > Where WCAG 3 (3.0) stands in the March 2026 W3C Working Draft: the 12-category, 44-guideline structure, requirement counts, and the return of Bronze/Silver/Gold. **Published:** 2026-08-04 | **Updated:** 2026-08-04 --- ## Introduction Search for "WCAG 3" and articles describing the 2021 draft still show up near the top — the era of scoring criteria and tallying them into a grade, a concept that has completely disappeared from the document by now. Web standard drafts change fairly often, and there's less material out there keeping up with the pace than you'd expect. This post rounds up where WCAG 3 (3.0) stands as of the **March 3, 2026 W3C Working Draft**. I want to cover how the structure changed, how many requirements there actually are, what happened to the conformance levels, and what's still left blank — all in one pass. For context, a **Working Draft** is one of several stages a W3C standard passes through. Think of it as the early stage where ideas get refined into an actual document — after the Working Draft stage comes Candidate Recommendation, then Proposed Recommendation, before a standard finally becomes a full Recommendation. WCAG 3 is currently sitting at the very earliest of those stages, and as we'll get into below, it's been sitting there for a while. ## Why the Korean-Language Material Keeps Being Out of Date WCAG 3's structure has changed several times since its First Public Working Draft came out in January 2021. December 2024, September 2025, and now the March 2026 draft we're looking at here — the name and structure shifted a little each time. The problem is that a lot of the explainer material still circulating is based on that original 2021 draft. Back then, WCAG 3 used a completely different conformance model: scoring each success criterion from 0 to 4, multiplying by a weight, and summing the results. Even the W3C WAI's own Korean-language introduction page hasn't been updated since May 2021, so a quick search alone won't get you to the current structure. So this post sticks to what's actually verifiable in the current draft. Every number below was counted directly from the draft text itself. ## POUR Is Gone — 12 Categories, 44 Guidelines If you've worked with WCAG 2.x, you know **POUR** (Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, Robust) — the four principles every success criterion was grouped under. WCAG 3 (3.0) doesn't have that structure anymore. Instead, it's organized as **12 guideline categories**, laid out flat by topic, with **44 guidelines** underneath them. 1. Images and media 2. Text and wording 3. Interactive components 4. Input / operation 5. Error handling 6. Animation and movement 7. Layout 8. Consistency across views 9. Process and task completion 10. Policy and protection 11. Help and feedback 12. User control Items that used to be scattered across the four POUR principles have been regrouped into units practitioners actually work in day to day, like "images," "layout," and "process." It's a genuinely different approach from the days of debating whether a given success criterion counted as P or O. {{< img src="images/contents/wcag3-structure-2026-en.png" alt="A diagram showing WCAG 2.x's POUR structure crossed out, replaced by WCAG 3's 12-category, 44-guideline structure - below it, a breakdown of 182 total items made up of 92 Core, 61 Supplemental, 28 Assertions, and 1 Best practice" >}} ## Counting Requirements By Hand — "174" Isn't the Current Number Counting directly from the draft text gives you this: | Item | March 2026 Draft | Notes | |---|---|---| | Core Requirements | 92 | All must be met at the base conformance level | | Supplemental Requirements | 61 | Up from 20 in the September 2025 draft | | Assertions | 28 | Up from 13 in the September 2025 draft | | Best practice | 1 | A new category introduced in the March draft | | **Total items** | **182** | Core + Supplemental + Assertions + Best practice | Add just Core and Supplemental together and you get **153 "requirements."** Add Assertions and you reach 181 — the three kinds of thing the draft means when it says WCAG 3 "consists of three types of provisions." Best practice sits *alongside* requirements and assertions as a separate category the draft adds on top, which makes it the 182nd item. Once you know which term is being counted, you'll immediately recognize why a different article quotes a different number — "ah, that one's counting requirements only." You'll often see blog posts claiming "WCAG 3 consists of 174 provisions." That's not a number from the current draft. Tracing it back, it appears to originate from a post discussing a much earlier draft from around May 2024, and it's been copy-pasted around ever since. Don't cite that number when referencing the current draft. > **Worth remembering: the renaming happened twice, at different times.** "Outcomes" became "Requirements" around December 2024, and "Foundational" became "Core" in the current March 2026 draft. A fair number of articles conflate the two changes as if they happened together — but `Foundational` doesn't appear anywhere in the current document. ## Bronze/Silver/Gold Are Back (But It's Not a Scoring System) The **Bronze/Silver/Gold** conformance tiers, present in the 2021 draft and then absent from both the December 2024 and September 2025 drafts, have returned in the March draft. Bronze requires meeting every Core requirement in scope, plus a "portion" of the Supplemental and Assertions requirements determined per functional performance statement — and that portion grows as you move up to Silver and Gold. The term **functional performance statement** might be unfamiliar — think of it as a sentence describing whether a particular user group (visual, auditory, cognitive, and so on) can perceive and operate the content. Judging conformance at this granularity means you can end up with a more nuanced result than a single blanket "our service is Silver overall" — something like "Silver for vision-related statements, Bronze for cognition-related ones." That said, exactly what percentage counts as a "portion" is still marked **to be determined**, and there's no scoring-and-summing system like the old model anywhere in the current text. Conformance grading is also evaluated per functional performance statement rather than for a site as a whole. There's a lot more to unpack here, so I covered the conformance model in its own dedicated post: [WCAG 3.0 Conformance Model: Moving Beyond A/AA/AAA](/en/posts/wcag-3-scoring-conformance/). ### But Won't Everyone Just Aim for Gold? From here on, this is my own take — not something the draft says. One question kept nagging at me while reading the tier section: **"So which tier do we actually aim for?"** Honestly, I think that answer converges on Gold for most teams — barring special circumstances. First, **the tiers are a distinction drawn for our convenience, not for users**. Saying "we're a Bronze site, so this is as far as our support goes" is, flipped around, saying "users past this line don't need to be able to use it." Deciding which requirements to drop is really deciding which users to drop. That's a harder call to make calmly in a meeting room than it sounds. Second, **regulation has already raised the floor**. WCAG 3 tiers carry no legal weight yet, but in Korea alone, public sector and education bodies have to meet KWCAG, and the web accessibility certification scheme audits against every checkpoint rather than a portion of them. The Anti-Discrimination Against Persons with Disabilities Act sits above all of that. In an environment like this, I wonder how many organizations could comfortably explain "we're targeting Bronze" to anyone, inside or out. Third — and this is the practical one — **it's a hard line to hold inside a team**. Once you establish "this item is Supplemental, so we can skip it," you have to re-defend that boundary every sprint. We all know what gets cut first when a deadline tightens. "We do all of it" is simply an easier rule for a team to keep. So why have tiers at all? I read them less as a menu of destinations and more as **a vocabulary for saying where you currently stand**. That was the most frustrating thing about WCAG 2: miss a single success criterion and the answer was just "non-conformant." You could fix thirty issues over six months, and if one remained, the report still printed the same words. There was no way to express the progress in between. Bronze/Silver/Gold puts markings on that all-or-nothing scale. The sentence you get to say isn't "we're happy at Bronze" but **"we're at Bronze on the way to Gold."** The goal is still Gold; you just get to report your position along the route — and for winning budget and keeping a team's morale intact, that difference matters more than it might sound. This is all guesswork before the thresholds land, of course. Whatever percentage that "portion" turns out to be could change how this feels entirely. Still, I hope the arrival of tiers doesn't make "let's go for a lower one" anybody's first reaction. ## What's Still Blank Read through the current draft and you'll run into the phrase "to be determined" more often than you'd expect from a standards document — there are a surprising number of blanks left in it. - **Conformance-level thresholds**: The actual percentage required for each of Bronze/Silver/Gold hasn't been set as a number yet. - **Default accessibility support set**: The March draft introduces a new concept called an "accessibility support set" — the browser/assistive-technology combination requirements get verified against — but the default set itself hasn't been defined yet. The fact that the default set is built around English content — and the clause letting regional regulators designate an alternative — leaves a particular blank for Korea, which I plan to cover in a post of its own. - **The definition of Assertion**: There are two different definitions of "what an Assertion is" inside the document itself, and they don't match. It remains an open, unresolved issue (#657). - **A change log that's stopped updating**: The change history in the draft's appendix (Appendix C) only goes up through the September 2025 draft. Changes made in the March draft aren't reflected in that table, so if you're checking what changed, don't trust the appendix alone — compare the body text directly. ## Timeline — When Might This Actually Get Finalized The working group's published schedule is a planning document, not a firm commitment, but it's still useful for a rough sense of timing. - Next Working Draft: expected Q4 2026 - Candidate Recommendation snapshot target: Q4 2027 - Historically, the gap between CR and final Recommendation has run around two more years — apply that same pattern here and you land on **somewhere around 2029** for the final Recommendation. One more thing worth knowing: the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group's current charter runs through August 28, 2026 — originally set to expire in October 2025, it has since been extended twice, first to April 2026 and then to August. A charter is the process by which W3C approves a working group's scope and duration, and as it approaches expiration, a re-chartering process has to happen. It's not unusual for goals or timelines to shift during that process, so treat the current schedule as something that could still move once re-chartering happens. ## What Practitioners Should Actually Do Right Now Bottom line: you don't need to change anything to align with WCAG 3 (3.0) right now. The Explainer document itself says WCAG 3 is a successor to WCAG 2.2, not a replacement that deprecates WCAG 2 — and it explicitly commits to covering at least everything WCAG 2.2 covers until the final Recommendation ships. There are really two things worth doing right now. One is simply keeping up your WCAG 2.2 conformance. The other, if you have some slack, is a light pass over your service using this draft's 12-category structure, just to see if anything's missing from your current checklist. To make that second one concrete: lay your current WCAG 2.2 checklist items out next to the 12 categories above, and mark which category each item maps to. Most will fit naturally — but the interesting ones are the items that don't fit cleanly anywhere. Those are worth a second look, since they may point to areas WCAG 3 newly emphasizes (process and task completion, or policy and protection, for instance). This isn't a big undertaking — an hour-long meeting is plenty. W3C itself has publicly posed three open questions about this draft: whether there are user needs it's missing, whether the "applies to / doesn't apply to" phrasing is easy to follow, and whether requirements should be broken down further or consolidated instead. In other words, there's still plenty of room for practitioners to weigh in. ## One-page summary - **Structure**: POUR is gone, replaced by a flat structure of 12 categories and 44 guidelines. - **Requirement counts**: Core 92 + Supplemental 61 = 153 requirements, plus 28 Assertions and 1 Best practice → 182 items in total. "174" is not a number from the current draft. - **Renaming**: Outcomes→Requirements happened around December 2024; Foundational→Core happened in the current March 2026 draft — two different points in time. - **Conformance**: Bronze/Silver/Gold are back, but it isn't a scoring system, and the thresholds are still undecided. - **How to read the tiers (my take)**: in practice I think most teams will converge on Gold — the tiers read less like a menu of destinations and more like a vocabulary for saying where you currently stand. - **Open gaps**: conformance-level thresholds, the default accessibility support set, a double definition of Assertion, and a change log that's stopped updating — plenty is still being worked out. - **Timeline**: the next draft is expected Q4 2026; even if things go according to plan, the final Recommendation lands around 2029. - **What to do**: maintaining WCAG 2.2 conformance is still the priority right now. I plan to revisit this post every time the draft gets updated. Getting everything I was curious about at this point in time written down in one place makes it a lot easier to compare what changed the next time the draft shifts again. --- {{< faq "Quick answers" >}} --- ## Other Posts in This Series - [The Dawn of WCAG 3.0: Why We Need New Guidelines]({{< relref "/posts/wcag-3-era-why-new-guidelines" >}}) - [WCAG 3.0 Structure Anatomy: From Success Criteria to Outcomes]({{< relref "/posts/wcag-3-structure-outcomes" >}}) - [WCAG 3.0 Conformance Model: Moving Beyond A/AA/AAA]({{< relref "/posts/wcag-3-scoring-conformance" >}}) - [Atomic Tests vs. Holistic Tests: A New Testing Approach]({{< relref "/posts/wcag-3-atomic-holistic-tests" >}}) - [Assertions: A New Unit for Accessibility Evaluation]({{< relref "/posts/wcag-3-assertions" >}}) - [WCAG 3.0 Expanded Scope: Beyond the Web]({{< relref "/posts/wcag-3-expanded-scope-beyond-web" >}}) - [WCAG 3 Migration: Do You Need It Yet? Moving On from WCAG 2.2]({{< relref "/posts/wcag-3-migration-strategy" >}}) ## References - [W3C Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 3.0 Working Draft (2026-03-03)](https://www.w3.org/TR/wcag-3.0/) - [WCAG 3.0 Explainer](https://www.w3.org/TR/wcag-3.0-explainer/) - [WCAG 2.2 Guidelines](https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG22/) --- > **Note**: This post is based on the **W3C Working Draft dated March 3, 2026**. WCAG 3 is still under development, and its content may change before the final Recommendation is published. Please refer to the original W3C documents when you need to make an actual decision.