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What Changed in the WCAG 3 September 2026 Draft: Levels Move from Conformance to Reporting thumbnail

What Changed in the WCAG 3 September 2026 Draft: Levels Move from Conformance to Reporting

↻ 2026-09-25 Updated On September 25, 2026, W3C WAI’s Director published a W3C blog post explaining the reasoning behind this structural change, so I added a new subsection, “WCAG Is the Ruler, Laws Are the Rules”, to the “Why the Change” section. It also includes what I found when I checked where the sign language requirements sit in the September draft. How to read the draft and the conclusions of this post are unchanged. 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. ...

Published date: 2026-09-10 · Updated 2026-09-25 · Reading time: 22 min · Word count: 4583 words · Author: Isaac
WCAG 3 Status Check: A Complete Rundown of the March 2026 Draft thumbnail

WCAG 3 Status Check: A Complete Rundown of the March 2026 Draft

↻ 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. ...

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