The W3C's Accessibility Guidelines working group pushed an updated editor's draft of WCAG 3.0 on October 7, 2026, and it's the clearest look yet at how the successor to WCAG 2.2 intends to replace the twenty-year-old A/AA/AAA checklist. If your team ships accessible web applications under WCAG 2.2 today — which is still the enforceable legal benchmark and isn't going anywhere soon — this draft is worth reading now, because the new model changes what "conformant" will eventually mean, not just how it's graded.
WCAG 2.2 asks a binary question per success criterion: does this page pass, or does it fail Level A, AA, or AAA? WCAG 3.0 restructures that into layers. Every Guideline now carries Core Requirements — the mandatory floor, tagged by the kind of harm they prevent (physical harm, a hard barrier, friction) — alongside optional Supplemental Requirements, Assertions a site can make about its own practices, and non-binding Recommended Practices. Meeting all Core Requirements across the guidelines is what the draft now defines as baseline conformance; the Bronze, Silver, and Gold language that's circulated since the March 2026 draft sits on top of that as a way to communicate how far past the floor a site goes.
WCAG 2.x's single pass/fail line was clear to test against, but it also meant two very different sites — one barely scraping Level AA, one far exceeding it — reported identically. The new model tries to give organizations and auditors a way to show that difference without inventing a fourth letter grade. It's also explicitly broader in scope: the draft's requirements are written to apply to desktop, mobile, wearables, and assistive technology contexts, not just the document-centric web WCAG 2.x was designed around in 2008. None of this is settled. The W3C's own WAI status page still describes WCAG 3 as "in an exploratory phase" that "will change substantially," and a finished recommendation isn't expected before 2028.
Nothing in this draft is testable against your site today, and nothing in it overrides WCAG 2.2 — legal and procurement requirements are still written against 2.1 or 2.2 Level AA, and that stays true for years. What's worth doing now is reading the Core Requirements for the guidelines closest to your product (forms, media, navigation) and checking whether your existing WCAG 2.2 AA conformance already covers them; the W3C itself expects it mostly will. The gap to watch for is the "harm" tagging — Physical Harm and Barrier-tagged requirements are the ones most likely to survive into a final Core Requirements set unchanged, so bugs that trip those tags are good candidates to fix now rather than wait for a spec that's still two years out.
The working group has flagged another update somewhere in the September–November 2026 window, and the WHATWG HTML Standard and ARIA specs it leans on keep shipping independently in the meantime. Treat WCAG 3.0 the way you'd treat any multi-year standards effort still in committee: read it for direction, not for a checklist, and keep shipping against WCAG 2.2 until the W3C says otherwise.