WCAG 3 December 2024 Update & Thoughts from the Co-Chairs

WCAG 3 Update Accessibility Guidelines Working Group

Introduction

This section covers the basics – what you need to know about the update and how to provide feedback. Read the full article for more interesting details.

The Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AG) has updated the W3C Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 3 Working Draft. This post presents an overview of this update as well as AG co-chairs thoughts on the standard’s direction. 

The December 2024 update includes three guidelines that were used to explore how WCAG 3 might be structured: 

  1. Image alternatives guideline
  2. Keyboard focus appearance guideline
  3. Clear meaning guideline

These guidelines are still developing and need a lot more work before they are ready to use. The AG would like feedback from you on whether the content organization and the labels (guidelines, foundational requirements, supplemental requirements, and assertions) make sense. 

Key questions for you to consider when reading the 3 developing guidelines:

  • Does this overall approach help you understand what needs to be done to make content accessible? 
  • How can it be improved?

The update also includes changes to the conformance section such as the overall approach to conformance and Section 3.1.1 Only accessibility-supported ways of using technologies.  You may notice that explanatory content from previous versions is no longer in WCAG 3. This content has been moved to the Explainer for WCAG 3, which was also updated.   

Key question for you to consider when reading the conformance section:

  • Do you have concerns about the direction conformance is moving?

We publish twice a year to give you visibility into the working group progress and an opportunity to give feedback. We welcome constructive comments on the direction conformance is developing. We recommend reading this post, the conformance section, and the explainer before sending feedback. 

Should you wish to provide feedback after reading, please file a GitHub issue or send an email to public-agwg-comments@w3.org (comment archive). Please create 1 GitHub issue or send 1 email per topic – it makes our work much easier which leads to faster standards creation.

Caveats 

These may seem dull but these pointers are really important to remember.

The majority of this draft is still Exploratory. Even the most mature portions have only just moved into the Developing stage of our content maturity process. We expect them to remain in Developing for a while.  

What does that mean? It means this draft content will change.  

The Accessibility Guidelines Working Group wants public feedback on WCAG 3 early and often. 

Remember:

  • This WCAG 3 draft doesn’t replace WCAG 2. WCAG 2 is used around the world and will still be required by different countries for a long time to come.
  • Public feedback is an important part of the W3C process and the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AG) takes the comments we receive seriously.
  • If you want to learn more about WCAG 3, please read the WCAG 3 Introduction.

Do not use this draft content as a standard or revise your accessibility program and goals to meet the contents written in this draft. We are not there yet!  If anyone tells you otherwise, they are uninformed or lying. 

WCAG 3 Structure

From here on, the content reflects the co-chairs thoughts about the direction this draft is taking. Not all AG members may agree but we hope it gives insight into the general direction and progress made. 

The proposed structure relies on Guidelines broken out into Requirements and Assertions. AG will be discussing including Recommendations.

Guidelines

Guidelines are written as user-centered outcome statements to make them easy to understand. These had been called Outcomes before and these were at various levels of detail. This draft clarifies the structure of Guidelines and Requirements.

Guidelines are organized into groups based on what is typically tested by that guideline.  POUR (perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust) is an excellent way to teach guidelines but many people reorganize WCAG 2 Success Criteria (SC) to facilitate testing.  The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) plans on building a tool that tags WCAG 3 requirements and allows users to reorganize them by POUR or other tags.

Requirements

Requirements are comparable to Success Criteria. AG changed the name so they are easily distinguishable as the required portion of this standard.  Requirements can be tested with repeatable results, though just like in WCAG 2, the requirements may need manual testing and educated judgement. 

Requirements are further divided into:

  • Foundational Requirements – These requirements present core needs that must be met to support people with disabilities. These may be met by authors, operating systems, browsers, or assistive technology but they must be met. AG expects the list of Foundational Requirements will be similar to A & AA WCAG 2.2 with additional support for disabilities not included there. For example, AG is exploring requirements that only apply to specific languages or writing systems. These requirements would include conditions and a plan for internationalization.
  • Supplemental Requirements – These requirements may include meeting a higher threshold than the Foundational requirements (think enhanced color contrast in WCAG 2) or they may best apply in specific situations. 

Assertions

Assertions have been discussed in previous drafts and continue to be an important part of WCAG 3. When making a conformance claim, assertions would allow the writer to state that they used a process to improve or verify accessibility such as using an accessible design system,  assistive technology testing, usability testing, or plain language testing.  

We are still working out how assertions will fit. For this draft they are included under Guidelines but they may be moved into their own section as we are finding that the same assertion covers multiple guidelines. You can read more about Assertions in Section 5.3 of the WCAG Explainer

Recommendations

The group will be discussing adding in recommendations.  Recommendations are best practices that improve accessibility but are not reliably testable. These have some overlap with Assertions and the group will need to spend time discussing this option and and trying these out before making a decision. You can also join the discussion about recommendations on GitHub.

The Goldilocks Organization Problem

One of the complexities in WCAG 2 is that a single sentence SC includes layers and layers of complexity. That makes the SC hard to write and hard to understand. We are attempting to break the complexity out into separate parts and create a structure that helps readers understand when to use each part. The challenge is finding the best balance between testability and complexity.

As we worked through this, decision trees became very helpful for the group. We have included some decision trees in this draft to get public feedback. 

From a chair perspective, we don’t think the current organization is quite right though we do think it is on the right track.  Some items we think need more work include:

  • Moving the details that support testing out of the How To documents and Methods and back into the normative document.
  • Refining decision trees by writing more examples.
  • Trying out decision trees that include all the Requirements, Assertions and Recommendations that could support the guideline. In the current draft the decision trees only include the Foundational Requirements.

WCAG 3 Conformance

The AG has decided that:

“The most basic level of conformance will require meeting all of the Foundational Requirements. This set will be somewhat comparable to WCAG 2.2 Level AA.

Higher levels of conformance will be defined and met using Supplemental Requirements and Assertions. AG will be exploring whether meeting the higher levels would work best based on points, percentages, or predefined sets of provisions (modules).”

This short statement reflects a lot of research and testing to narrow down the approach. As a reminder, this is still in draft. The AG will spend the first half of next year working on the guidelines. The AG may, after testing, decide against this approach but this is the direction we will be moving until we prove it doesn’t work. 

Like WCAG 2, WCAG 3 will have a set of core requirements and an extra set of requirements. Unlike WCAG 2, conformance levels won’t map directly to those sets. The most basic level of conformance to the standard will be the Foundational Requirements plus some subset of the Supplemental Requirements and Assertions. 

AG will be exploring whether the author should select which Requirements and Assertions to meet in order to reach a certain number based on points or percentages OR whether AG will create modules of related content for authors to meet based on certain criteria. For example, a module about plain language may be more important for educational materials than for other types of materials.

As an example of how this might work, the most basic level of conformance (Bronze perhaps) might ask that content meets all the Foundational Requirements and 10% of the Supplemental Requirements OR all the Foundational Requirements and a plain language module. It is worth noting that many plain language requirements are being worked on as Foundational, rather than Supplemental requirements or assertions. However, some will likely fall into the optional grouping. 

WCAG 3 can only recommend conformance to its own technical specification.  It will be up to governments to write that conformance into law. One of the biggest risks of the proposed approach is that the legal standard will simply point to the Foundational Requirements, mimicking WCAG 2. However, the AG deemed that risk less severe than the risk that entire groups of people with disabilities would be left out if the conformance model gave authors the ability to choose which requirements to meet without constraints.

Accessibility Supported

WCAG 2 includes the concept of accessibility supported and conforming alternate versions but in our experience they rarely comes up in conversation outside the working group.

In WCAG 3, we are working to make these ideas much more visible. WCAG provides guidance for authors, not operating systems, browsers, or assistive technology. That said, whenever publicly available user agents like these are able to support accessibility requirements it reduces the burden on the author. 

In WCAG 2, the AG does not write guidance that user agents already support. There is no criteria for visible pointers because pointers are typically visible. The challenge with this gap is that when new technologies are developed, there is no complete list of criteria for new technology to meet. We are exploring the idea of using the decision trees in part to allow WCAG 3 to age gracefully by providing a list of criteria that user agents and new technologies can use to support accessibility. If user agents meet WCAG 3 guidance, authors could then focus on not breaking that support rather than building it in.

Next Steps

AG will spend the next 6 months focusing on moving all the guidance to the developing stage. This will include removing some guidance that needs additional research and looking for research partners willing to conduct that research. At the same time, we will be working to refine the structure in this draft and continue to address difficult topics such as third party content and complex, rapidly updating content.

Rachael, Alastair, & Chuck

May 2024 WCAG 3 Working Draft Update

The Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AGWG) has updated the W3C Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 3 Working Draft.This draft includes an updated list of the potential outcomes which we are exploring. The list of outcomes is longer than a listing of Success Criteria list in WCAG 2.2. Why? Because the intent at this stage is to be as inclusive as possible of potential outcomes.  

We expect this exploratory list to change and evolve:

  • The final set of outcomes in WCAG 3 will be different from the list in this draft. 
  • Outcomes will be added, combined, and removed. 
  • The text of the Outcomes will evolve, likely to become more specific and identify exceptions. 
  • Outcomes that need more research at the time of our first draft will be postponed to a future draft when the research can better support them.
  • Only some of the Outcomes will be required at the base level of conformance.

Why are we publishing if the guidelines are only an early draft? 

The Accessibility Guidelines Working Group wants public feedback on WCAG 3 early and often. For this update, we hope public reviewers will help us to:

  • Better understand the scope of needs by providing feedback on guidance we missed and should be exploring, and
  • Locate and conduct research to validate or invalidate the outcomes listed.

When reviewing this update, please focus on the Guidelines section. We did not make changes to conformance related sections and we did not publish an updated WCAG 3 Explainer.  

Please consider the following questions when reviewing this list of outcomes:

  • What outcomes are needed to make web content accessible and are missing from this list?
  • What research supports or refutes these outcomes?
  • Are any of these outcomes out of the scope of accessibility guidance? If so, please explain why.

Then give use your feedback on these questions by filing a GitHub issue or sending email to public-agwg-comments@w3.org (if you are unable to use GitHub). Please create 1 GitHub issue or send 1 email per topic – it makes our work much easier which leads to faster standards creation. 

We want to hear from you, especially if:

  • You know of missing guidance;
  • You know of existing research relating to an Outcome; or 
  • You are interested in conducting research in a related area.

As always it’s worth noting that: 

  • This WCAG 3 draft doesn’t replace WCAG 2. WCAG 2 is used around the world and will still be required by different countries for a long time to come. 
  • Public feedback is an important part of the W3C process and the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AG) takes the comments we receive seriously.
  • If you want to learn more about WCAG 3, please read the WCAG 3 Introduction.

Happy Global Accessibility Awareness Day!

useable

I believe we need to shift the way we think and talk about disability and accessibility. We need more holistic conversations about what it means to be disability-friendly. Focusing on just a building, just a website, just an email, just an event, or just an accommodation – well, it is just not enough. We live our lives moving between these spaces. I believe our discussion of accessibility needs to do so as well.

I founded Accessible Community to address this and we are committed to nurturing disability-friendly communities through ethical technology. Unlike many functional needs mappings, the tools we are building require a mapping that includes facilities, events, websites, social media, and accommodations. 

The taxonomy has to be detailed enough that we can map accessibility requirements to functional needs but clear and usable enough that a wide audience of people with disabilities could use it successfully. We have used a multi-level approach to meet these often conflicting needs.

This work resulted in useable, a multi-level disability needs taxonomy. To celebrate disability pride month and to encourage more disability-centered tools, we shared our mapping in an open source GitHub repository. There is currently a JSON structure that can be incorporated into various tools by simply downloading it.

Useable is a work in progress. We encourage anyone interested to review and comment on it. We will incorporate comments and feedback monthly. Our goal is that useable will aid in worldwide tool development of disability-centered applications. Please help us shift the conversation.

Understanding the WCAG 3 Working Draft Update

Understanding the WCAG 3 Working Draft Update

The WCAG 3 Working Draft has been updated. WCAG 3 doesn’t replace WCAG 2. WCAG 2 is used around the world and will still be required by different countries for a long time to come. 

When we published the first public working draft, we received over 300 comments.  Public feedback is an important part of the W3C process and the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AG) took the comments we received seriously. We aggregated and organized the feedback and revised our approach to WCAG 3. 

Below is an overview of what you will find in this draft: 

  • All content is labeled with content maturity levels: Placeholder, Exploratory, Developing, Refining, and Mature. There has been confusion in the past about how mature content is and when to adopt it. These maturity levels inform readers about how complete and ready to use each piece of content is.
  • You will find a placeholder list of guidelines. We have temporarily removed all of the draft guidelines that were in earlier drafts of WCAG 3. These guidelines were initial examples.  Over the next 6-9 months we will be writing an exploratory draft of outcomes for each guideline. Part of this process will be updating previous draft content, such as the APCA approach for color contrast, and adding that guidance back in within the context of the full set of guidelines.
  • This draft presents pieces of a conformance model which have shown promise during conversation and testing. These include conformance levels, percentages, pre-assessment checks, issue severity, and user generated content. This working draft does not contain a complete conformance model. We’ve reviewed numerous options but want to evaluate each for testability, repeatability, etc. before publishing the most promising model.
  • The AG is applying a more granular way of thinking about guidance based on how repeatable test results are by the same tester and across testers. Clearly identifying when tests contain a subjective component will help when explaining and applying WCAG 3.
  • We have added an approach that allows for guidance that only applies in certain conditions, such as situations where a specific language is used.
  • We have also added “Assertions”. Assertions are statements about whether a process was completed. Examples of such processes include usability testing, plain language evaluations, and assistive technology testing. Testing an assertion only includes evaluating whether an organization made an assertion, and if the required documentation is complete. Testing an assertion does not test the results of the process. The hope is that Assertions will allow WCAG to promote certain processes that improve accessibility without requiring repeatable results.

You can read more about this update at the WCAG 3 Introduction.

We are not requesting wide review, that is, we are not looking for general public feedback on this draft, but you are always welcome to comment through GitHub. If you are not able to use GitHub, email public-agwg-comments@w3.org. Please create 1 GitHub issue or send 1 email per topic.

I will be posting additional details about WCAG 3 and the next steps for the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group over the next week or two.

Why members of the disability community must support each other

I am arranging sign language interpreters for mutua11y’s upcoming workshops. I am surprised by how many of of the interpreting companies’ websites (100% so far) are inaccessible. Some even use overlays. I am often also surprised by videos on accessibility that are not captioned or interpreted so the situation is a two way street.

It has been my experience, both as an individual with a disability and an accessibility professional, that the disability community lives in silos.

As an overarching community of people with disabilities, caretakers, allies, and advocates we need to do better in supporting each other. We need to put in the work to make our products, websites, content, etc. accessible. It is not enough to say, I need this accommodation. We must say, “I need this accommodation and recognize that you need a different accommodation.” We need to work together to demonstrate disability inclusion. Anything less undermines the overall message of inclusion and accessibility.

It is also not helpful to assume that someone with one disability knows how to support someone else’s needs. Attacking each other when we don’t get it right also undermines our message and goal. I believe inaccessibility must be approached first as opportunities for education, inside and outside the disability community.

Finally, I want to acknowledge that this is not easy. Real accessibility takes effort and engagement. It takes working together and thinking ahead. It also takes changing attitudes and shifting the focus from the work needed to the benefits gained.

So what can you do about this?

  • Commit to broad accessibility. Learn about the diversity within the disability community. Follow disability advocates and educators on social media. Respectfully ask questions when you don’t know.
  • If you lead an organization, one resource is Accessible Community’s tip of the week. This gives you one recommended action you can complete in a week to improve accessibility.
  • Stand up for your needs and those of others. I prefer to do so with an education-based approach and with compassion but find what works for you.

WCAG 2.2 Updated Candidate Recommendation (Take 2)

In response to concerns raised with the Focus Appearance and Target Size success criteria in the most recent Candidate Recommendation (CR), the working group has decided to publish another CR. This allows review and implementation of the substantive changes proposed to address these concerns, along with fallback options (known as “at risk”) if the solutions raise new concerns.

The group felt that keeping these success criteria is important and that the changes were valuable enough to delay the final Recommendation. Restarting CR starts a new 90-day patent review clock, so we are looking at finalizing the Recommendation in Q3 of this year.

The following changes have been made since the last CR:

  • Focus Appearance has been simplified, made slightly more rigorous to reflect new research, and moved to AAA. Several notes were also adjusted to support these changes.
  • Focus Visible will not be moved to A and will remain at AA
  • Two exceptions in Target size have been modified:
    • The phrase “ or is in a bulleted or numbered list” has been removed from the Inline exception. This has no effect on the intent to provide an exception for text links in body. The phrase was too narrow and was causing confusion. Additional explanation about inline lists will be included within the understanding documents.
    • The spacing exception was reworded to use a 24 CSS pixel diameter circle centered on the bounding box instead of a target offset.

You can read the revised editor’s draft.

As always, you can learn more from What’s New in WCAG 2.2

CSUN Talk: WCAG 3 Update

I had a chance to talk at CSUN today about WCAG 3. The slides were fresh off the presses to make sure they included the work that the AGWG did on Monday. They also are information dense so I wish we’d had two hours to really dive into them. The slides are attached for anyone interested.

We were full up and had to turn a number of folks away. CSUN is unable to support a second session (I asked) so I will try to record a virtual version and post it here in a week or two.

To all those who could attend – Thank you.

Room full of accessibility professionals

WCAG 2.2 Updated Candidate Recommendation

During the first Candidate Review period several issues were raised that the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AG) felt needed to be addressed before publication. As a result, the AG made changes and has published an updated Candidate Recommendation (CR) of WCAG 2.2

The changes included:

  • 2.5.8 Target Size (Minimum): Changed to the exceptions for spacing and incline targets and a new note on interpreting line height.
  • 3.2.6 Consistent Help: Changed to the first note.
  • 3.3.8 Accessible Authentication:  Changed the first note.
  • 3.3.9 Accessible Authentication (No Exception): Renamed to Accessible Authentication (Enhanced)
  • 4.1.1 Parsing: Removed

The new Candidate Review period began on January 25th. Based on this, the AG expects to finalize WCAG 2.2 as a W3C Recommendation in mid-April. 2.4.11 Focus Appearance remains at risk. 

As always, you can learn more from What’s New in WCAG 2.2

WCAG 2.2 Update

WCAG 2.2 is still in the candidate recommendation stage. During this stage we are testing websites that implement the new Success Criteria (SC) to make sure the SC are feasible. We are also processing recent comments. Based on where we are in that process and the upcoming holidays, we now expect the release to occur in early 2023.

You can learn more at What’s New in WCAG 2.2.