WCAG 3.0 is an active W3C Working Draft in development by the AGWG. Requirements, assertions, the conformance model and reporting tiers are still being developed and may change. The latest published draft is the 10 September 2026 Working Draft; this site follows the editors’ draft, which also includes exploratory provisions.
Tabbing does not move focus onto content that was not visible before the tab press, apart from skip links and similar hidden aids to keyboard navigation.
Why It Matters
Focus landing on something invisible strands sighted keyboard users, who can see the focus indicator disappear but not where it went.
Accordions, dropdown menus, and ARIA tab panels are examples of expandable content. According to this requirement, these would not expand simply because they include an element in the tab-order contained in them. They would either not expand or would not have any tab-order elements in them.
Examples from the Draft
Worked examples the W3C editors wrote into the provision itself, not
examples invented here.
A menu that expands when you tab to it, but then uses arrow keys to navigate in it would pass. But a menu that expands and then requires you to tab through all the newly-visible elements to navigate past it would fail.
Check that keyboard focus does not disappear into content that is not visible.
Check that hidden element does not automatically expand (become visible) when the keyboard focus is on it (unless it is a visually hidden element specifically added to aid keyboard navigation) (for example, skip to main content).
Expected results
#1 and #2 are true.
W3C Working Group Status
W3C Maturity Status:developing
Track / Group:input-operation
The draft records no open editors' notes on this provision.
W3C Threads on This Provision
1 GitHub thread carrying 0 comments,
fetched from w3c/wcag3 by the
tracker. Titles, numbers and states are the threads' own.
Nobody has read these threads and written up the positions yet, so
only the threads themselves are listed.
Except for skip links and other elements that are hidden but specifically added to aid keyboard navigation, tabbing does not move the keyboard focus onto content that was not visible before the tab action.
:::note
Accordions, dropdown menus, and [ARIA tab panels](https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/tabs/) are examples of expandable content. According to this requirement, these would not expand simply because they include an element in the tab-order contained in them. They would either not expand or would not have any tab-order elements in them.
:::
:::example
A menu that expands when you tab to it, but then uses arrow keys to navigate in it would pass. But a menu that expands and then requires you to tab through all the newly-visible elements to navigate past it would fail.
:::