Translating W3C Standards for Designers, Developers, QA & Product teams
Tracking W3C editors' draft c110b49 (2026-10-07).
Every figure on this page comes from that commit and is refreshed by the upstream tracker.
This update to WCAG 3 moves the concept of leveling from conformance to reporting.
W3C Accessibility Guidelines 3.0, 10 September 2026 Working Draft, conformance section (editor's note)
A/AA/AAA has no successor. WCAG 3 has one conformance bar — all core requirements met — and wraps it in six reporting tiers that describe progress toward it and achievement beyond it.
The working group is running a competing proposal alongside this one: scoring toward conformance, then Bronze/Silver/Gold awards afterwards. They have explicitly asked for public comment on which approach to keep. Treat the tier table as the current direction, not a settled outcome.
Each tier is cumulative, building on and including everything in the tiers before it. Only tier 3 is conformance — the tiers below it describe progress toward it, and the tiers above it describe achievement beyond it.
| Tier | Provisions required | Role |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Avoid physical harm | Physical harm and risk requirements are met | Progress toward conformance |
| 2 Foundational access | …plus barrier requirements | Progress toward conformance |
| 3 Conformance | …plus friction requirements — all core requirements are met | Conformance |
| 4 Bronze | …plus [TBD number of] supplemental requirements and assertions about content | Beyond conformance |
| 5 Silver | …plus [TBD greater number of] supplemental requirements and assertions about content | Beyond conformance |
| 6 Gold | …plus [TBD number of] the assertions about the organization | Beyond conformance |
Core requirements are tagged by the kind of harm that not meeting them causes. Those tags are what sort a requirement into tier 1, 2 or 3.
None of the 245 provisions carry these tags yet. The tier model is described in the draft, but the tagging that makes it operable has not been applied. Until that changes, no one can tell you which tier a given provision lands in — including this site.
Content that conforms to WCAG 2.2 Level A and Level AA is expected to meet most of the minimum conformance level of this new standard but, since WCAG 3 includes additional tests and different scoring mechanics, additional work will be needed to reach full conformance.
W3C Accessibility Guidelines 3.0, 10 September 2026 Working Draft (unchanged in the editors' draft)
Read "most of" carefully. A clean 2.2 AA programme is a strong head start on tier 3 and no guarantee of it. The gap comes from three places: provisions with no 2.2 ancestor, provisions that restate a 2.2 criterion more broadly, and the evidence that assertions require.
W3C has committed to transition support materials that may use mapping to ease migration. Those do not exist yet, so every 2.2 → 3 mapping on this site — and anywhere else — is an interpretation, not an authority.
These are the parts of WCAG 3 that are not a restatement of WCAG 2.2 in new words.
Three conformance levels — A, AA, AAA — and you picked one to claim.
One conformance bar at tier 3: all core requirements met. Tiers 1–2 describe progress toward it; tiers 4–6 describe achievement beyond it.
There is no AA any more. A programme built around "we do A and AA, not AAA" has no direct translation — the equivalent question becomes whether every core requirement is met.
Every success criterion was a test against rendered output.
36 of 245 provisions are assertions — statements that your organization did something, backed by evidence: who asserted it, when the review or usability testing happened, what scope it covered.
No automated tool will ever satisfy one, and neither will clean markup. They are satisfied by style guides, documented reviews, and usability testing with disabled participants. This is the longest-lead item in the whole draft.
Conformance was per-page, with conforming alternate versions as the escape hatch.
Claims apply to a conformance scope — "a clearly defined part of your content". Claims are also optional: content can conform without anyone claiming it does.
The unit of audit becomes a product, a flow, or a defined slice of a site. Per-page pass/fail spreadsheets do not port over, and deciding your scope boundaries is a product and legal question as much as a technical one.
"Accessibility supported" was a definition that mostly sat in the background.
Methods MUST be accessibility supported, WCAG 3 defines accessibility support sets naming which browsers and assistive technologies count, and the support set MUST be included in conformance claims.
If you make claims you will have to state your AT and browser baseline in them. Most teams hold this as tribal knowledge or a stale QA matrix. Writing it down is cheap and useful regardless.
Success criteria at three levels, and nothing else normative.
Core requirements (MUST, and the whole of conformance), supplemental requirements, and assertions — plus recommended practices, renamed from "best practices", which are explicitly not necessary to conform.
The AAA instinct — nice if we get to it — maps roughly onto supplemental, but not cleanly. Eight provisions carry no upstream type in the draft and are tracked here as exploratory.
Ordered by whether the work depends on the draft settling. The first column does not — which is why it is the first column.
Useful regardless of how the draft lands
36 assertions are waiting for exactly this evidence, and it cannot be retrofitted after the fact.
The browser and AT versions you actually test against, dated and owned. Claims will have to state it, and it is useful on its own.
Alt text, captions, transcripts, audio description, focus indicators. Several assertions are satisfied by a documented style guide plus evidence it is followed.
Products, flows, or defined slices — not pages. Worth settling before anyone has to declare one.
Low cost, likely to pay off
68 of 245 provisions are media. If you publish video, this is where the new work is concentrated.
The reworked provision is broader than the old repetitive-links one, and the fix is a real usability improvement either way.
Building for this now is premature
Zero of 245 provisions carry the harm/barrier/friction tags that drive tier placement, and the tier model has a live competing proposal.
29 provisions are exploratory and 13 are flagged as needing more research. Single Flash is the one most likely to surprise people.
2.2 is still the standard, WCAG 3 does not deprecate it, and nothing in the draft has reached refining maturity.
Cases where a WCAG 2.2 success criterion does not cover the new provision cleanly.
The single media-alternatives guideline was dissolved into captions, audio descriptions, transcripts, sign language and accessible media player. Nine criteria that used to point at one outcome now fan out across 54 provisions in the editor's draft (captions 19, audio descriptions 17, transcripts 13, sign language 3, accessible media player 2), each with its own speaker identification, non-verbal cues, equivalence, style guide and usability testing requirements.
No Flashing became No Flashing Over Threshold, plus a no-exceptions variant. A new exploratory Single Flash provision has no 2.2 equivalent at all: content must not change contrast by more than 4.5:1 light-to-dark across more than 30% of the viewport. It could catch in-page transitions and theme toggles, not just video. Loading a new page/view is exempt, and an editor's note says the editors need data and "a definition that includes size/intensity to avoid including non-triggers such as menus."
No Repetitive Links became No Repetitive Adjacent Interactive Elements, and the wording widened from repeated links with the same destination to any adjacent interactive elements that achieve the same outcome. The common card pattern — thumbnail link, title link and Read more link all pointing at the same page — fails the new wording (a supplemental requirement, so not needed to conform) and passes WCAG 2.2.
The Sep 2026 draft contains no provision requiring that focus stay visible when content would obscure it. The nearest requirements make obscuring content dismissible, which is not the same obligation. Treat this as a genuine gap rather than a mapping we have not found.
The upstream tracker checks the W3C editors' draft weekly. These are the signals it reports first, in priority order.
Last checked against c110b49 (2026-10-07).
Explore the provisions themselves in the
WCAG 3 Explorer, or compare against the
WCAG 2.2 Reference.