WCAG 3: a different future for accessibility

Posted on Thursday, 15 October 2026 by Léonie Watson in Standards

Tags: WCAG

Did you know that when given a minimum payment threshold, people pay off about 70% less from their credit card than they would have done without it?

The minimum payment doesn't change the number of people who pay off their full outstanding balance, but it dramatically changes how much everyone else chooses to pay.

In the US, credit card firms are obliged, by law, to inform people about the cost of only paying the minimum amount required. Specifically, how much more interest they will pay if they only stick to minimum payments. It makes no difference.

Some people always aim to exceed the minimum threshold. The overwhelming majority don't, even when they know that the minimum isn't good for them.

Anchoring

It's a psychological effect known as anchoring; and studies have shown that even when someone is aware of the anchor, they're still susceptible to its pull.

The anchoring effect is a psychological phenomenon in which an individual's judgments or decisions are influenced by a reference point or "anchor" which can be completely irrelevant.

In the credit card case, the minimum payment doesn't encourage people to pay more, it creates a ceiling that effectively discourages them from doing so. This, of course, works for no-one except the credit card companies who get to collect all that extra interest over the lifetime of the outstanding balance!

It's a hard thing to acknowledge, but in accessibility, that gap between meeting a minimum threshold and something actually working, is what nearly 30 years of binary conformance testing has given us.

Unintended consequences

WCAG 1 and WCAG 2 did something remarkable. They brought accessibility to the attention of organisations and teams on an international scale, and gave the world a legal hook. Governments, regulators, and courts pointed at WCAG and said "meet this, or else".

That is no small achievement, but thanks to the laws of unintended consequences, it also caused us to optimise for "pass" instead of "usable". It built an entire industry around scanning for failures, instead of testing with people.

In the social sciences, unintended consequences (sometimes unanticipated consequences or unforeseen consequences, more colloquially called knock-on effects) are outcomes of a purposeful action that are not intended or foreseen.

It's why "We meet WCAG Level AA"; and "Disabled people can actually use our site", are not always the same thing.

If you think this is an exaggeration, think about Success Criteria (SC) like 2.1.1 Keyboard that requires that all functionality works with a keyboard but doesn't care how obscure or unintuitive the keyboard commands are.

Or 1.4.4 Resize Text that requires that text can be resized up to 200% but doesn't set a minimum size to begin with.

It is, and always has been, possible to build a WCAG compliant website that people are unable to use. But even the regulatory hook was less intentional than you might imagine.

Levels A, AA, and AAA weren't derived from an analysis of where the legal threshold should sit. They were essentially inherited from the priority levels of WCAG 1. Priorities that were based on issue triage, not the ability of a person to complete a task.

Regulators didn't choose WCAG 2 Level AA because it was the best legal option. They chose it because it was the only viable option.

WCAG 3

W3C understands this. This is why it's doing something few standards bodies ever do - it's rebuilding one of its most successful standards, arguably one of the world's most successful standards, and it's doing it right now, and it's doing it in public.

WCAG 3 is the first ground-up rebuild of the standard since it was first released in 1999. It's not a point release, it's an entirely different model. Instead of just asking "Does this page have alt text for images", it asks "Can a blind person actually consume the image's content". That's a very different question, and it needs a very different standard to answer it.

With the caveat that it's still a work in progress, the WCAG 3 model consists of core requirements, supplemental requirements, and assertions.

The idea is simple, conforming to WCAG 3 means meeting all the core requirements.

Organisations that want to demonstrate greater accessibility maturity can then do so by meeting supplemental requirements and making assertions about their processes and practices. Organisations can choose if they want to be recognized for the bronze, silver, or gold standard of accessibility.

In other words, conformance is now a floor, not a ceiling.

One encouraging (but still early) proposal centres WCAG on the people intended to benefit. The idea is to tag requirements and assertions based on human impact. Will the resulting issue cause physical harm, create a risk, impose a barrier, or create friction?

If this becomes part of WCAG 3, it will do something that WCAG 1 and 2 did not; acknowledge that humans are every bit as non-binary as the testing methodology we need.

There is an elephant in the room though. Almost every accessibility law you can name references WCAG. These laws don't define "accessible" for themselves, they point to WCAG, to a particular version and a particular conformance level, and they say "meet that".

Binary pass/fail didn't just give us a testing methodology, it became the foundation for the entire regulatory architecture of digital accessibility. So when we replace pass/fail with a graded methodology, as WCAG 3 will do, we don't just change the way we assess products and services for accessibility, we change the thing that regulators, courts, and procurement officers, have been pointing at for decades.

This is not a small problem. If W3C gets it wrong, if those of us involved in creating WCAG 3 get it wrong, we don't get a better standard, we get a beautifully designed standard that no-one can use.

So how do we do this, without either freezing accessibility forever circa 2008 because we're too scared to change, or handing regulators a standard they can't adopt?

It turns out, the answer is already taking shape. The regulatory hook is still there. In the conformance model that's being proposed, meeting all core requirements means conforming to WCAG 3, and that will be broadly equivalent, though not identical to, WCAG 2.2 Level AA.

Does this solve the anchoring problem? No, not entirely, but it does change the way the anchor is deployed.

Regulators could, for example, decide that for small organisations, conformance is enough, but that larger organisations should be expected to demonstrate a higher standard of accessibility maturity. Organisations responsible for critical services, emergency healthcare for example, could be required to do even more.

Extrinsic motivation

Of course, WCAG 3 can't enforce legal adoption, any more than its predecessors could, but unlike its predecessors, it can do something far more effectively; wield something called extrinsic motivation.

Extrinsic motivation arises from external factors, such as rewards, punishments, or recognition from others. This occurs when people engage in an activity because they are interested in the effects or the outcome of the activity rather than in the activity itself.

In WCAG 2, accessibility was anchored at Level AA. Level AAA SC make some things better, for some people, some of the time, but by WCAG's own definition, they were never intended to be widely applicable. In other words, the ceiling was set, and the motivation to do more, do better, effectively evaporated.

What's curious, to me at least, is why some organisations choose to do more, to do better. Why do organisations like the BBC or McDonald's set themselves a higher standard, when they're under no legal obligation to do so?

The answer is extrinsic motivation. Wanting to be recognized as best in class, as achieving more, doing better than the rest.

Gamification

If this seems familiar, it should. One of the most common forms of applied extrinsic motivation is gamification.

Gamification is the process of integrating game design elements and principles (such as points, badges, and leaderboards) into non-game contexts in order to increase user engagement and motivation.

From Duolingo leagues to Playstation trophies. From Delta Air Miles to Marriott Bonvoy points. From Starbucks rewards to Disney, it's apparent that we humans like a bit of competition, especially if we get to demonstrate in some public way that we're more widely travelled, more caffeinated, or better at mashing our gamepad controls than the next person.

By tapping into this possibility of doing more, doing better, WCAG 3 represents a very different future for accessibility.

One where conformance is the floor, not the ceiling, and where bronze, silver, and gold give organisations a way to play the recognition game - but still with the promise of the regulatory machine behind it.

W3C's vision is for an interoperable world-wide web that is for all humanity; designed for all people; and safe for everyone to use.

That's a vision worth chasing, now more than ever, in these days of AI, deep fakes, and so much misinformation.

It's a vision for every organisation that chooses to do more than the law requires.

It's a vision that's right here, right now, in every person who's ever tested accessibility with a disabled person instead of a checklist, because it felt like the right thing to do.

WCAG 3 embodies that vision. It's an innovative accessibility standard in the making. It's predicated on the idea of a web for all humanity - an accessible web designed for everyone, and a web that is safe from physical harm, risk, barriers, and even friction for everyone - including those of us who happen to have a disability.

Next steps

For more information about the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, read our WCAG primer or find out more about how our assessments can help you identify issues in your websites, mobile applications, design systems, and other products and services.