Best Practices – Digital Asset Guidelines – Rev 4 www.autocare.org | www.autocarevip.com | technology@autocare.org 40 Appendix A: W3C Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 3.0 A.1 About WCAG 3.0 This introduction provides a brief background to WCAG 3.0. Detailed information about the structure of the guidelines and inputs into their development is available in the Explainer for W3C Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 3.0. That document is recommended reading for anyone new to WCAG 3. This specification presents a new model and guidelines to make web content and applications accessible to people with disabilities. The W3C Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 3.0 support a wide set of user needs, use new approaches to testing, and allow frequent maintenance of guidelines and related content to keep pace with accelerating technology change. WCAG 3.0 supports this evolution by focusing on users’ functional needs. These needs are then supported by outcomes and technology-specific methods to meet those needs. Following these guidelines will make content more accessible to people with a wide range of disabilities, including accommodations for blindness, low vision, and other vision impairments deafness and hearing loss limited movement and dexterity speech disabilities sensory disorders cognitive and learning disabilities and combinations of these. Following these guidelines will also often make content more usable to users in general as well as accessible to people with disabilities. WCAG 3.0 is a successor to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2 [WCAG22] and previous versions, but does not deprecate WCAG 2.X. It will also incorporate content from and partially extend User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 [UAAG20] and Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 [ATAG20]. These earlier versions provided a flexible model that kept them relevant for over 10 years. However, changing technology and changing needs of people with disabilities have led to the need for a new model to address content accessibility more comprehensively and flexibly. There are many differences between WCAG 2.X and WCAG 3.0. Content that conforms to WCAG 2.2 A & AA is expected to meet most of the minimum conformance level of this new standard but, since WCAG 3.0 includes additional tests and different scoring mechanics, additional work will be needed to reach full conformance. Since the new standard will use a different conformance model, the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group expects that some organizations may wish to continue using WCAG 2.X, while others may wish to migrate to the new standard. For those that wish to migrate to the new standard, the Working Group will provide transition support materials, which may use mapping and other approaches to facilitate migration.