What to Expect in WCAG 3.0

Join Natalie Garza and Natalie MacLees for the 22nd episode of the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast. In this episode, they delve into the history of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), covering versions 1.0 through 2.2, and offer an in-depth discussion on the structure and objectives of the upcoming WCAG 3.0. They explore the changes in guidelines, requirements, and vocabulary and discuss the draft state of WCAG 3.0.

Natalie Garza: Hello everybody, and welcome to the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast. This is episode 22, and my name is Natalie Garza. I’m one of the co-hosts, and with me today is,

Natalie MacLees: Natalie MacLees, the other co-host.

Natalie Garza: and she is an accessibility expert here to answer our questions. And in this episode we’re gonna talk about WCAG 3.0.

Natalie MacLees: WCAG 3.0. We did our best.

Natalie Garza: We did our best to research and investigate. So we’re gonna share our notes with you guys and our thoughts. But, to start off, Natalie, do you wanna give us a quick history on WCAG’s versions?

Natalie MacLees: Yeah, sure. So early on, people figured out that we needed guidelines to figure out how to make the web accessible. So WCAG 1.0 was released in 1999 to kind of help address that. It was pretty simple. It was just 14 guidelines, and they had a priority one, two, or three, which kind of roughly became A, AA, and AAA, when 2.0 came out in 2008.

And that’s where we got the structure we know now, where we have the POUR principles. Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, Robust, with the success criteria and the guidelines underneath those four principles. The web moved along, new technology came out, and people started buying smartphones left and right. They realized there was some things that didn’t get addressed in 2.0.

So we got 2.1, which came out in 2018, which added some more rules around mobile devices and also added some more rules for people with cognitive disabilities and, low vision. Again, the web moved along new technologies and we got WCAG 2.2 pretty recently in October of 2023, which added even more guidelines for people with cognitive disabilities and also with motor impairments.

So just addressing some things that got left out and addressing some new technologies and things as the web moved along.

Natalie Garza: So do you want to give us a quick introduction to WCAG 3.0.

Natalie MacLees: Yeah, so when we WCAG 1.0, it was really focused on HTML, ’cause CSS and JavaScript were so new at the time, like nobody was really thinking about them. And when we had 2.0, that’s when they really started thinking about, “Oh, there’s CSS and JavaScript.” And of course, we see a lot of the techniques and things.

We’ll reference scripting and CSS. But the web has really kind of moved on. We have really robust, rich applications that can take the place of desktop applications, which we take for granted now, and we forget how revolutionary those were. And 2.0 doesn’t really do a super great job at addressing that.

So 3.0 is coming along to help and bette...