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.
developingRecommended practice
Return To Start Prominent
Group: layout • Guideline: user-orientation
Summary in Plain English
A recommended practice: ways to get back to the starting point of the conformance scope are prominent, both visually and programmatically.
Why It Matters
A reliable way home is what makes exploring safe. Without it, getting lost means starting over.
For HTML, a good programmatic positioning of such a mechanism would be early in the DOM.
Examples from the Draft
Worked examples the W3C editors wrote into the provision itself, not
examples invented here.
Common design practices place the homepage link for websites in the top-left corner on the site logo.
Common design patterns for mobile applications is to include a sticky navigation at the bottom of the viewport which often includes a control to return to the starting point.
Test Procedure from the W3C Draft
Upstream has a test heading for this provision but has not written
the procedure yet, and no test steps have been written here.
Generic advice would apply to almost any provision, so none is shown.
W3C Working Group Status
W3C Maturity Status:developing
Track / Group:layout
The draft records no open editors' notes on this provision.
W3C Threads on This Provision
2 GitHub threads carrying 1 comment,
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.
Mechanisms that return the user to the starting point of the conformance scope are available in prominent positions both programmatically and visually.
:::note
For HTML, a good programmatic positioning of such a mechanism would be early in the DOM.
:::
:::example
* Common design practices place the homepage link for websites in the top-left corner on the site logo.
* Common design patterns for mobile applications is to include a sticky navigation at the bottom of the viewport which often includes a control to return to the starting point.
:::