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What’s new on the WCAG 3.0 working draft? (December 2021)
AGWG just released a new Working Draft for WCAG 3.0. Let’s see what’s new.
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7 min readDec 10, 2021
While the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AGWG) is still working on getting WCAG 2.2 finalized, they are also working on the upcoming WCAG 3.0 standards.
Just a few days ago (December 7th, 2021), they released a new Working Draft of WCAG 3.0. We’ll go over the changes made from the previous Working Draft that came out in June 2021.
WCAG 3.0 — Summary of what’s coming
In a previous article, I went over some of the changes that are coming with WCAG 3.0.
The changes are pretty substantial. Here is a list of some important characteristics of WCAG 3.0:
- WCAG 3 will be a parallel standard with WCAG 2.2. Content providers can choose either standard to measure compliance.
- Success Criteria will be called Outcomes in WCAG 3.
- Outcomes are given a Rating of 0 to 4, with 4 being the best score.
- WCAG 3 is expanding beyond the web. They plan to re-coin the acronym WCAG from Web Content Accessibility Guidelines to W3C Accessibility Guidelines.
- WCAG 3 introduces Functional Categories which are disability groups (e.g., Vision and Visual, Hearing and Auditory, Learning, Memory, etc.). In addition to the content being rated against the Outcomes, but they’ll also be rated against Functional Categories.
- Changes to the WCAG 3 Series will be more frequent than the WCAG 2 Series — WCAG 2.1, the current recommendation, was released in 2018.
- A Critical Error is a violation of a specific Outcome that will result in a rating of 0 for that Outcome. Not all Outcomes will have a Critical Error.
- WCAG 3’s conformance will be determined with a final rating. The three conformance levels are Bronze, Silver, and Gold.
- Holistic tests (tests that require real-world use of assistive technology to determine compliance) will be used to determine if the content meets Silver or Gold conformance levels.
