WCAG 3 Is Years Away, But Its Conformance Model Already Changes How We Brief Sites

The W3C published an updated WCAG 3 working draft this month, on its usual six month cycle, with changes to the conformance model. Nobody should hold their breath waiting for it to matter in practice: a Candidate Recommendation is not expected before 2027, and the working group's own co-chair has said a finished 3.0 recommendation is unlikely before 2029.

What is worth paying attention to now, years early, is the shape of the change. WCAG 2 was written for web pages and scored sites as pass or fail against numbered success criteria. WCAG 3 treats accessibility as an organisational practice that spans every digital surface a customer touches, not just a page, and replaces pass or fail with a graded scoring model closer to how real audits already work in practice.

That shift matches what we see on client briefs already. Accessibility questions increasingly come up about a whole product experience, an app, an email flow, a PDF, not just whether one webpage clears a checklist. We have started briefing new site builds against the direction WCAG 3 is heading rather than only the WCAG 2 checklist a client's procurement team hands us, because a site built to satisfy a specific numbered criterion sometimes fails the actual experience the new model is trying to measure. The standard itself will not land for years. The thinking behind it is worth building towards now.