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WCAG 3 is not ready yet

Article by Eric Eggert, reminding people that WCAG 3 won’t be released for another 3-5 years. The new standard is still in draft form and is subject to change. Commercial and public projects are, generally, required by law to comply to WCAG 2, and WCAG 3 is not backwards compatible, so we must take care to continue to abide by WCAG 2 in the meantime. WCAG 2.1 is the latest official standard, with 2.2 coming sometime this year.

Eric focuses in on the new colour contrast algorithm that’s coming in WCAG 3: “the visual contrast algorithm, APCA, is a stark departure from the luminosity contrast algorithm used in WCAG 2”. Unlike in WCAG 2, APCA takes font face, size and weight into account, better representing how colour perception works in practice. The trade-off of extra complexity “might be totally worth it”, but there is little actionable advice in the specification at time of writing.

If we were to have a “modular WCAG”, similar to what CSS is doing, we could package up new success criteria into a new version. Eric says this would give room to change ratings and evaluation guidelines per criterion, without having to release a new major version. It’s an interesting thought!

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