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.
When keyboard focus moves between contexts within a page, returning to the previous context restores focus to where it was - unless that place no longer exists.
Why It Matters
Being dumped back at the top of a long page after closing a dialog can mean re-traversing the entire page, which is slow and disorienting for keyboard and screen reader users.
0
Examples from the Draft
Worked examples the W3C editors wrote into the provision itself, not
examples invented here.
When a user closes a modal dialog or other popup, keyboard focus is returned to the element that caused the dialog or popup to open.
When there are tags, with a delete button on each tag, the keyboard focus needs to be moved to a meaningful location after a tag is deleted.
When removing interactive elements such as filters, dialogs, or popups that currently contain focus, actively place the focus back on the element that led to that element, the previous element within the focus order, or another meaningful location.
Recommended Practices (Upstream)
Conduct usability testing with screen reader users to evaluate the focus movement.
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 2 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.
When keyboard focus moves from one context to another within a page/view, whether automatically or by user request, the keyboard focus is preserved so that, when the user returns to the previous context, the keyboard focus is restored to its previous location unless that location no longer exists.
:::example
When a user closes a modal dialog or other popup, keyboard focus is returned to the element that caused the dialog or popup to open.
:::
:::example
When there are tags, with a delete button on each tag, the keyboard focus needs to be moved to a meaningful location after a tag is deleted.
:::