Cross posted from Linkedin, and this refers to the Sept 10th 2026 WCAG 3 draft.
Overview
We are excited to share a new draft of WCAG 3 that includes an updated approach to conformance!
The Requirements for WCAG 3 include both:
- facilitating adoption into law, regulation, or policy, and
- motivating organizations to go beyond minimal accessibility requirements.
These two, slightly competing goals, have led the group to explore many (many, many) approaches to leveling and scoring within the conformance model. Only two of the many possibilities have been published for more consideration. Neither have provided both the flexibility and support for harmonization that the group desires. Harmonization refers to international regulation around accessibility adopting requirements based on the same core standard. The goal of harmonization is to make it easier for everyone to meet and adopt accessibility practices, particularly when working across regulatory environments such as the United States, Canada, China, and the European Union.
The conformance model in this draft changes the approach from trying to fix everything within conformance to balancing flexibility and harmonization by adding reporting tiers alongside conformance.
In this draft, conformance is only a single level. The requirements included in this level are comparable to WCAG 2.2 A & AA, though there are additions to better support people with low vision, cognitive, and auditory disabilities. Every requirement will be tagged so it fits within a reporting tier based on the highest predicted impact, without taking context into account. These tiers lead up to and beyond conformance and can be used for reporting or potentially, compliance. Regulators could, in theory, choose to enforce a higher tier in certain situations such as for public sector, educational or healthcare digital products.
Every tier below conformance is an optional reporting tier that builds up to Conformance. Every tier above Conformance shows a commitment to creating more accessible experiences. The higher tiers include assertions about content-related-processes such as usability testing and assertions about organization-related-processes such as training. They also include supplemental requirements.
Background on the conformance change
Thank you to everyone who has provided feedback on previous conformance proposals. We read the issues filed and commentary online when we find it. We appreciate thoughtful, constructive feedback in any form. We do not appreciate false marketing that misleads people into thinking WCAG 3 will be here in the immediate future. Please continue to work towards meeting WCAG 2.2 A & AA and encourage others to do the same! WCAG 3 is built on that and won’t be lowering those requirements.
Feedback from the public and from the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group led to the current change in approach. We realized that we had been trying to provide a mechanism to have a larger impact but were constrained by the narrow scope of what conformance allows. To understand this, it may be helpful to revisit some terminology within the context of WCAG 3.
- Conformance refers to whether something satisfies the requirements listed within the guidelines. Conformance directly relates to the standard. Individual requirements may include exceptions or caveats, but conformance does not. Something is either conformant or it is not.
- Compliance refers to how well something meets law, regulation, policy, contract, or procurement requirements. Compliance typically relates to regulation and policy. Compliance can include exceptions, time frames, and other caveats that conformance does not.
We often refer to conformance as the ruler and compliance as the rule that uses the ruler. The marks on a ruler do not change, but a regulator can require different target measurements for different scenarios and specify how much wiggle room is allowed when measuring.
Previous conformance models have tried to provide more flexibility within conformance (the ruler) to allow regulators flexibility while still promoting harmonization. This proposed approach steps away from that. It keeps conformance narrowly scoped to a single level that everyone can harmonize around but provides flexibility through tagging requirements for reporting tiers. We also intend to provide Notes (less formal publications, like the current WCAG-EM) to suggest ways to use this tagging in testing, reporting, and regulation.
Questions about this draft
For the Sept 10th 2026th draft:
- Does this proposed conformance approach, which sets a single conformance level and uses tags to provide reporting tiers below and above that level, improve upon the conformance approach in previous drafts?
- An alternate proposal in the Explainer uses the tags to generate a score above and below conformance. What pros and cons do you see for each approach?
- In your role, how would you leverage reporting tiers leading to conformance or above conformance?
Next Steps
If you want to weigh in on the revised WCAG 3 conformance approach:
- Read the Introduction to WCAG 3, the Conformance Section, and the alternate proposal in the Explainer.
- To provide input, please file issues on GitHub. If you are unable to use GitHub, send email to public-agwg-comments@w3.org.
Remember: WCAG 3 is still in development and it will be a few more years before it is done. Focus on meeting WCAG 2.2 and disregard advertising claims that reference WCAG 3.