What’s Becoming Mandatory in WCAG 3

If you have been treating WCAG 2.2 Level AA as the finish line, the latest WCAG 3 draft is worth twenty minutes of your attention. Not because it is enforceable—it is not, and will not be for years—but because it shows which things the working group now considers the floor rather than the extra credit, and some of those were optional under 2.2.

The W3C published the current Working Draft on 10 September 2026. It is the tenth since January 2021, and every one has been a Working Draft. W3C says plainly it is not expected to be a finished standard for a few more years.

So this is not a compliance deadline. It is a direction of travel, and the direction is clear enough to start planning around.

What is actually changing?

Three things worth knowing. The A, AA and AAA levels are gone, replaced by core requirements you must meet and supplemental ones you may choose. Some provisions that were AAA under WCAG 2.2, meaning almost nobody did them, are now in the core. And conformance has become a single bar rather than a set of grades.

Conformance is one bar now, not three

This is the part most published guidance still gets wrong, including articles written after the draft came out.

You will find plenty of sources describing WCAG 3 as having Bronze, Silver, and Gold conformance levels. That was an earlier model. In the editors’ own words, WCAG3 from the September 2026 draft “moves the concept of leveling from conformance to reporting.”

What that means in practice:

• Conformance is binary. You meet every core requirement, or you do not conform.
• Bronze, silver, and gold still exist, but as reporting tiers above the conformance bar. They describe accessibility beyond the minimum, not degrees of compliance.
• There are also other tiers below conformance for showing progress toward it.

If you are writing policy or procurement language off a blog post that mentions Bronze-level conformance, the post is out of date.

The conformance section also moved from Exploratory to Developing status between the March and September drafts, which in W3C terms means the working group is more settled on it than it was six months ago.

What moves from optional to mandatory?

Transcripts are the clearest example. Under WCAG 2.2, captions for video are Level A or AA depending on the content type, but a full text transcript for audio and video is AAA. In the current draft it sits in the core.

That is a real operational change. A team producing weekly webinars can caption them and be compliant today. Under the draft model, they would also need transcripts.

Media guidance was restructured around this. What used to be one “media alternatives” guideline is now nine separate guidelines, with Transcripts, Sign Language, and Accessible media player each promoted to guidelines in their own right. When a working group gives something its own guideline, it is signalling that it expects the thing to be done, not considered.

A note on scope: the draft contains a larger set of core requirements than we have listed here, and the full list is in the draft itself. The working group has been explicit that items will be added, combined and cut before anything is final, so treat any list, including this one, as a snapshot rather than a specification.

Every requirement now has a severity tag

This is new and has had almost no coverage. Each core requirement in the September draft carries one of four tags describing the worst-case impact of failing it:

1. Physical Harm — failure could cause physical injury
2. Risk — failure creates significant danger to the user
3. Barrier — failure blocks access entirely
4. Friction — failure makes things harder but not impossible

WCAG 2.x never ranked failures this way. A Level A failure and another Level A failure were the same kind of problem regardless of what they did to a user. Tagging by consequence lets a team sort a remediation backlog by harm rather than by level, which is how most people would want to triage anyway.

It also feeds the reporting tiers. Clearing all requirements tagged Physical Harm and Risk gets you one tier. Clearing the Barrier ones gets you to Foundational Access. Conformance is when everything is cleared, Friction included.

Does WCAG 3 still only cover websites?

No, and the name change says so. The standard is now the W3C Accessibility Guidelines, with “Web Content” dropped from the title. Scope extends to apps, authoring tools, publishing and emerging technology. The current draft includes two immersive-content requirements covering captions and direction indication in XR, both at Developing status.

For anyone producing documents, courseware, or publishing output, that is the detail to watch. The old framing of WCAG as a website standard that documents borrowed from is being retired.

What should you do about it now?

Urgently? Very little. But eventually, something needs doing. For now:

• Keep conforming to WCAG 2.2 AA. It is what the law references. Section 508 still points at WCAG 2.0 AA, and the ADA Title II rule at 2.1 AA. Nothing about WCAG 3 changes either.
• Treat the core list as a preview, not a plan. W3C expects substantial change before this is final.
• Look at transcripts if you publish media regularly. This is the change most likely to need a new process flow rather than a new tool.
• Fix your internal documentation. If your policies describe Bronze, Silver, and Gold as conformance levels, correct that now rather than later.
• Comment if it affects you. The draft is open for feedback through the working group’s GitHub, and this is the stage where comments change outcomes.

The useful way to read a working draft is not as a rulebook but as a statement of intent. W3C is saying that transcripts, severity-weighted triage, and coverage beyond the browser are where accessibility is heading. None of that is required yet. All of it is worth knowing before it is.