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Introduction Standards documents change quietly. One morning an email titled “For Review” shows up in your inbox, and when you open the link, the document you read last time has a different structure. On September 10, 2026, the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) published a new WCAG 3 (3.0) Working Draft and sent out a call for review comments. A red pen resting beside the fanned-out pages of an open book - standards drafts get revised this quietly, and this often Photo: Emmanuel Phaeton / Unsplash This post is a direct comparison between that September draft and its immediate predecessor, the March 3, 2026 draft. I covered the March draft in WCAG 3 Status Check: A Complete Rundown of the March 2026 Draft — and one of that post’s key sections just got flipped on its head. ...

↻ 2026-09-10 Updated A new Working Draft was published on September 10, 2026, and it changes the premise of the “Bronze/Silver/Gold Are Back” section below. The September draft defines a single conformance line (all core requirements met) and moves Bronze/Silver/Gold out of conformance into reporting tiers. The requirement count also grew from 182 to 216. This post stays as a record of the March draft; the changes are covered in What Changed in the WCAG 3 September 2026 Draft. 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. ...

↻ 2026-07-30 Updated This post reflects the W3C Working Draft of March 3, 2026. It accounts for Foundational being renamed to Core, and the basis-document reference has been corrected to the current draft. Introduction When people hear “accessibility testing,” they often think of a checklist: “Does this button have alternative text?” “Is the contrast ratio high enough?” WCAG 2.2 is built around clear pass/fail checks like these. WCAG 3.0 moves toward a broader unit of evaluation, aiming to consider overall user experience quality. That shift naturally changes how we test. We now combine fine-grained checks (Atomic) with real-world contextual evaluation (Holistic). ...

↻ 2026-09-10 Updated The Working Draft of September 10, 2026 changed the conformance model again. Bronze/Silver/Gold below are no longer conformance levels. The September draft sets a single conformance line (all core requirements met) and moves the levels into reporting tiers below and above conformance. Core requirements now carry severity tags (Physical harm, Risk, Barrier, Friction), and the conformance section moved from Exploratory to Developing. The body below still reflects the March draft; the new structure is covered in What Changed in the WCAG 3 September 2026 Draft. ↻ 2026-07-30 Updated ...