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When “pass” and “grade” show up in the same document, it’s tempting to put them on one line: the passing mark is the lowest grade, and the grades climb from there. Most exams work that way. WCAG 3’s conformance and Bronze, Silver, and Gold are easy to read the same way. On October 16, I gave a talk, What the WCAG 3.0 Draft Asks of Evaluation Methods, at a meeting of the Digital Accessibility Standardization Forum’s service subcommittee. In the Q&A, someone asked: “What’s the difference between meeting conformance and Bronze, Silver, Gold? And what do you have to do to get them?” I couldn’t answer it well with only the materials I’d prepared, and I’ve regretted that since. So I went back to the WCAG 3 Working Draft published on September 10, 2026, with just that one question in mind. WCAG 3 is the standard W3C is building to succeed WCAG 2.2, and a Working Draft is one that isn’t final yet. ...

I put the same page into two checkers. One says “needs review.” The other says “fail.” If your team has used more than one automated accessibility checker, you’ve probably seen this. So which one is right? I decided to answer that with numbers. The 37 accessibility test rules that W3C has approved come with 558 approved examples, each one labeled with the correct answer: this HTML passes, this HTML fails. I ran them through axe-core and IBM Equal Access, one by one. Of the 430 cases both tools checked, 413 agreed on whether the example fails (407 if you count “cannot tell” as its own result). The 17 that split were mostly cases where one tool returned cannot tell, or where one tool failed code that ACT doesn’t consider a failure. ACT rules are the yardstick for this comparison. The format they’re written in, ACT Rules Format 1.1, became a W3C Recommendation, W3C’s name for an official web standard, in February 2026. ...

Not many people go back and recalculate the numbers in a report. I didn’t either. When I wrote up the WebAIM Million 2026 report this past July, I copied one line straight into the post: “average of 1,437 elements per home page, up 22.5% in a single year.” Then, while researching a follow-up post, I looked up last year’s figure: 1,257. Going from 1,257 to 1,437 is 14.3%, not 22.5%. I asked WebAIM, and they confirmed it was a calculation error and corrected the original text. ...

WCAG 3 September 2026 Working Draft explained: one conformance line, Bronze/Silver/Gold as reporting tiers, and 216 requirements counted by hand.

How do screen readers handle aria-live status messages? A demo-driven look at WCAG 4.1.3, polite vs. assertive, debounce timers, and icon or sound status.

If you’ve ever run an accessibility checker, you’ve probably seen a line somewhere in the results like, “This result was verified on a specific browser and screen reader combination.” Every accessibility evaluation starts from some baseline environment. But what exactly counts as that “baseline environment” is something standards documents have rarely defined with any precision. The March 2026 Working Draft of WCAG 3 (3.0) puts a name to this gap — the accessibility-support set — and structures it into a formal clause (§3.2.2). The term itself existed in earlier drafts too; what this draft adds is splitting it into a default set and an alternative set, numbering the clause, and giving it a proper place within the conformance requirements. Read the definition closely, though, and you’ll find a line stating that the baseline is oriented toward English content. This post walks through exactly what that clause says, and what it means for local assistive technology environments like Sense Reader (센스리더), Korea’s dominant local screen reader. ...

“Once WCAG 3 ships, what happens to the KWCAG we’re following right now?” That’s the question I get most often since publishing our complete KWCAG 2.2 guide. “WCAG 3” has started coming up often enough in accessibility newsletters and conference talks that it’s only natural to wonder how KWCAG, our domestic standard, should respond to this shift. Short answer up front: the two standards are moving at different speeds right now, and there’s no need to relearn KWCAG anytime soon. That said, a fairly significant structural shift is on the horizon, so it’s worth knowing the general direction if you work in this space. This post walks through what’s different between the two standards and why that difference matters. ...

A code-first, try-it-yourself rundown of WCAG 2.2's 6 most-used new success criteria, plus the 3 AAA criteria and how KWCAG 2.2 and global standards stack up.

A first-timer's guide to Korea's Web Accessibility Certification: why get it, KWCAG 2.2, review stages, pass lines, fees, and what it doesn't guarantee.

“Your project spec says ‘must comply with KWCAG 2.2.’ But what does that actually mean you have to do?” If you’ve ever worked on an accessibility project in Korea, you’ve probably paused at a line like that at least once. Search around and you’ll find WCAG mentioned in one place, KWCAG in another, versions 2.1 and 2.2 tangled together — it’s easy to lose track of which standard you’re actually supposed to follow. This post breaks down what KWCAG 2.2 actually is and how it’s structured, from a practitioner’s point of view. ...