2026 is upon us and the work of the W3C Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AGWG) continues…
WCAG3 – 4 MORE YEARS?
From reading the draft minutes for the AGWG meeting 13th January 2026, there is skepticism about the working groups ability to get WCAG3 to Candidate Recommendation status (CR) within 4 years
CR does not mean that WCAG3 is finished
Timeline concerns me more. To be able to get to Candidate Rec within 4 years, I’d sign up for that but I don’t buy it. Most of work is still ahead of us. So many edge cases and exceptions to write. I don’t see how this will be done in the timeline proposed and there’s barely a timeline.
If the WCAG3 timeline is 4 years to W3C Candidate Recommendation
A Candidate Recommendation is a document that satisfies the technical requirements of the Working Group that produced it and their dependencies, and has already received wide review. W3C publishes a Candidate Recommendation to
- signal to the wider community that it is time to do a final review
- gather implementation experience
So in 2030.
In the year 2031…
Is a Candidate Recommendation endorsed by the W3C?
In 2030 WCAG3 will be at the stage before becoming a W3C Recommendation. I expect it to be a further year or so for it to become a fully fledged W3C Recommendation…
Mirror in the bathroom
lyrics
Mirror in the bathroom, please talk free The door is locked, just you and me Can I take you to a restaurant that's got glass tables? You can watch yourself while you are eating Mirror in the bathroom, I just can't stop it Every Saturday you see me window shopping Find no interest in the racks and shelves Just ten thousand reflections of my own sweet self Mirror in the bathroom You're my mirror in the bathroom You're my mirror in the bathroom You're my mirror in the bathroom Mirror in the bathroom recompense For all my crimes of self defense Cures you whisper make no sense Drift gently into mental illness Mirror in the bathroom, please talk free The door is locked, just you and me Can I take you to a restaurant that's got glass tables? You can watch yourself while you are eating Mirror in the bathroom Mirror in the bathroom Mirror in the bathroom Mirror in the bathroom Mirror in the bathroom Mirror in the bathroom
4 replies on “LAST WEEK IN WAI #3”
Hi Steve,
I think the minutes may have left a different impression. If you look at the timeline (https://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/wiki/WCAG_3_Timeline#Publication_Plan), the proposal is to get to a draft CR at the end of 2027. There will still be a lot of informative docs to do, but essentially that’s getting everything that’s part of WCAG 3.0 (the core spec) to a mature state.
Something that Melanie Philipp said at TPAC last year stuck with me: We need a widely publicized “come use and test this” version, well before we get to full publication. Then the next charter period is to take all the comments and refine it. In W3C process “draft CR” is probably the closest thing.
Yeah, I was somewhat confused by the disapirity in the discussion, with the current publication timeline. Am waiting to review the updated charter.
Four years sounds over-optimistic to me too. I am reminded of what happened with WCAG 2.0, which was a radical change from WCAG 1.0, just as WCAG 3 is a radical change from WCAG 2.
After years of development, the first WCAG 2.0 CR was published in 2006. The accessibility community’s reaction was one of total horror and incredulity.
In attempting to make WCAG 2.0 technology independent, the authors had made it incomprehensible. You had to mentally translate every sentence into something you understood before starting to consider what it meant. Remember “web units” and some of the other strange terminology? The document was withdrawn, almost entirely rewritten and did not become a recommendation until two years later.
I fear WCAG 3 will go the same way because it is an even bigger change.
I often wonder why we don’t develop WCAG more like the software industry we’re serving.
WCAG follows an all-or-nothing release model: gather requirements, write specs, release for comment, tweak, repeat, ship. That’s how software used to work, but not anymore.
I understand why this model exists. Legal frameworks need stable targets. Testing tools need time to align. Training is built around fixed versions. These are real concerns.
But the cost of waiting for perfection now exceeds the cost of iterating in public. WCAG 2.0 to 2.1 took over a decade while mobile and touch interfaces evolved without guidance. Developers built inaccessible patterns because the standard hadn’t caught up.
Other standards bodies have figured this out. HTML is a living standard. CSS ships as independent modules. Conscript releases annually. Why can’t WCAG do the same? Work on multiple improvements, understand dependencies, release what’s ready?
Yes, you risk shipping something imperfect. But if you can iterate quickly, you don’t need perfection on day one.
I would like to see us live by what we tell people when we discuss accessibility “Value progress over perfection.”