The internet is integral to modern everyday life. As such, digital accessibility is essential to building and maintaining a more equitable society. Since 1999, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) have been around to help achieve this. But technology and the internet have changed significantly over the decades, and WCAG has also evolved.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published the first draft of the next generation — W3C Accessibility Guidelines 3 (WCAG 3) — in 2021. This updated set of guidelines aims to provide organizations and businesses with a more straightforward path to creating more inclusive online experiences for people with disabilities.
If you're familiar with WCAG, you may wonder if it's worth learning about WCAG 3 since version 2.2 has yet to come out. And if you're not, you may be wondering about the role of WCAG period. Let's address both of these points and look at the benefits of following the development of WCAG 3.
The current state of WCAG
As of writing, WCAG 2.1 is the current version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and has been in effect since 2018. It's recognized as the international standard for web accessibility and includes benchmarks, recommendations, and techniques for making web content more accessible to people with disabilities. Developers, designers, and content creators use WCAG to improve accessibility.
The guidelines are organized around four principles for accessible web content:
- Perceivable – Content and interface elements must be perceptible to users.
- Operable – Users must be able to interact successfully with the interface.
- Understandable – The interface and content must be understandable.
- Robust – Content must be compatible with various devices, browsers, assistive technologies, and other user agents.
W3C plans to publish the final version of WCAG 2.2 in early 2023. It will include the following:
- All the criteria are from versions 2.1 and 2.0.
- Nine new success criteria.
- Persona-based insight to help clarify criteria.
How does WCAG 3 differ from WCAG 2?
The main difference between WCAG 3 and WCAG 2 is the scope of each set of guidelines. WCAG 2 focuses on web accessibility, but the content people need to access is less and less limited to websites. And as technology advances, the ways digital content may be delivered become more diverse.
WCAG 3 aims to address this by setting standards for various content types and devices, including static and dynamic content, extended reality (XR) content, assistive devices, wearables, and more. Additionally, a new structure and updated language will make standards easier to understand and implement. Rather than success criteria, WCAG 3 will present requirements as outcomes and provide methods and how-to documentation to achieve those outcomes.
These outcomes will be:
- Written in plain language – One of the issues many people have encountered with WCAG thus far is that the documentation can be hard to understand without familiarity with web development. WCAG 3 will avoid using technical jargon, making it easier for non-developers to understand and implement.
- User-oriented – Similarly, the current version of WCAG focuses on the technical side of accessibility. Of course, making technology more accessible requires a technical approach at some point, but technology does not define accessibility — user needs do. WCAG 3 aims to take a user-oriented approach to meet accessibility needs, allowing for more adaptation to meet these needs as technology continues to change.
- More specific – Outcomes will be more specific than current success criteria to keep things simple and clear. As a result, future outcomes will outnumber current success criteria.
- More flexible – WCAG 2 assessments tend to be rigid, based on true-false tests. But WCAG 3 will allow for more flexibility in accessibility solutions and testing for them.
Why do I need to know this now?
Considering it will be a few years before WCAG 3 becomes official, it may seem too early to worry about future guidelines now. Especially since keeping up with the current requirements already takes up resources. But that's exactly why it's beneficial to know about them ahead of time.
A big part of keeping your content accessible is staying ahead of the game. When the new guidelines become official, there will probably be costs associated with implementing them. With early knowledge of future standards, you can plan, budget, and start designing and developing content gradually with future technologies in mind.
Conclusion
WCAG 3 will be an important step forward in evolving web accessibility standards. The new guidelines will provide a more detailed, user-friendly framework for making digital content accessible for people with disabilities. The improved flexibility means that organizations will have a clearer, more customizable path for providing more inclusive experiences.
And though it's still a few years away, looking to the future of web accessibility standards can help us make significant strides in accessibility today.
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