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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. ...

If you’ve ever run an accessibility checker, you’ve probably seen a line somewhere in the results like, “This result was verified on a specific browser and screen reader combination.” Every accessibility evaluation starts from some baseline environment. But what exactly counts as that “baseline environment” is something standards documents have rarely defined with any precision. The March 2026 Working Draft of WCAG 3 (3.0) puts a name to this gap — the accessibility-support set — and structures it into a formal clause (§3.2.2). The term itself existed in earlier drafts too; what this draft adds is splitting it into a default set and an alternative set, numbering the clause, and giving it a proper place within the conformance requirements. Read the definition closely, though, and you’ll find a line stating that the baseline is oriented toward English content. This post walks through exactly what that clause says, and what it means for local assistive technology environments like Sense Reader (센스리더), Korea’s dominant local screen reader. ...

“Once WCAG 3 ships, what happens to the KWCAG we’re following right now?” That’s the question I get most often since publishing our complete KWCAG 2.2 guide. “WCAG 3” has started coming up often enough in accessibility newsletters and conference talks that it’s only natural to wonder how KWCAG, our domestic standard, should respond to this shift. Short answer up front: the two standards are moving at different speeds right now, and there’s no need to relearn KWCAG anytime soon. That said, a fairly significant structural shift is on the horizon, so it’s worth knowing the general direction if you work in this space. This post walks through what’s different between the two standards and why that difference matters. ...

↻ 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. ...

Introduction This is the seventh post in the WCAG 3.0 series. The expanded scope post looked at how far WCAG 3.0 reaches “beyond the web.” This time, I want to answer a question a lot of people keep asking me. “Should we migrate to WCAG 3.0?” Short answer up front: not yet. But there’s an important nuance to that answer. “Conformance” and “improvement” are two different conversations. Source document: This post is based on the W3C Working Draft of March 3, 2026. Drafts are generally updated on a roughly six-month cycle, so details may have shifted by the time you’re reading this. ...

↻ 2026-07-30 Updated Updated the basis document to the W3C Working Draft of March 3, 2026 — one draft newer than the version cited at publication time. Introduction This is the sixth post in the WCAG 3.0 series. This time I want to unpack what “beyond the web” actually means in practice. The earlier posts looked at structure, testing, and Assertions — now it’s time to get clear on “how far does the scope actually reach?” ...

↻ 2026-07-30 Updated This post reflects the W3C Working Draft of March 3, 2026. Foundational was renamed to Core, so related wording has been corrected, and the Assertions count (28) and their role in level determination have been updated to match the current draft. Introduction In Atomic Tests vs. Holistic Tests: A New Testing Methodology, we discussed balancing Atomic and Holistic tests. Now we need to address how we’ll “assert” and “document” these results. This is where Assertions come in. ...

↻ 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). ...

↻ 2026-07-30 Updated Numbers and terminology have been corrected to reflect the W3C Working Draft of March 3, 2026. The requirement count has been corrected from 170+ to 153 (Core 92 + Supplemental 61), and Foundational has been replaced with Core. The widely-circulated figure of “174” is not traceable to a source, so it has not been used here. Introduction “1.3.1 Info and Relationships - Level A” If you’ve worked with WCAG 2.2, you’re familiar with this format of Success Criteria. Numbers, levels, and clear test conditions. This structure has been the standard for web accessibility for over 15 years. ...

↻ 2026-07-30 Updated Refreshed the timeline: added the 3 March 2026 Working Draft milestone and revised the completion outlook against the working group’s schedule (CR snapshot targeted for Q4 2027). Introduction “Our site passed WCAG 2.1 AA 100%, but screen reader users still can’t sign up.” I keep thinking about this comment I heard at a conference last year. They passed accessibility audits, got the green badge, but users with disabilities still couldn’t use core features. This is the biggest dilemma facing WCAG 2.x today. ...