How WAI Develops Accessibility Standards through the W3C Process: Milestones and Opportunities to Contribute | Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) | W3C
The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) develops web accessibility guidelines, technical specifications, and educational resources to help make the web accessible to people with disabilities. This document introduces how WAI works through a process designed to:
ensure broad community input, and
encourage
consensus
development.
W3C standards
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops the
standards for the web
. WAI is part of W3C and follows the
W3C Process
for developing web standards.
W3C’s web standards are called ‘
W3C Recommendations
’. WAI has developed several W3C Recommendations, including:
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, see
WCAG Overview
Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines, see
ATAG Overview
User Agent Accessibility Guidelines, see
UAAG Overview
Accessible Rich Internet Applications, see
WAI-ARIA Overview
[WAI Accessibility Guidelines] that are [W3C Recommendations] are [Web Standards]
Milestones
Editor’s Drafts
have no official standing and do not necessarily represent Working Group consensus; that is, the draft might include proposals that the Working Group has not agreed on.
The milestones that a W3C ‘technical report’ goes through on its way to becoming a W3C Recommendation are listed below.
Working Draft
: Working Drafts are published and announced specifically to ask for review and input from the community. Often there are issues that a Working Group would particularly like input on. Usually multiple Working Drafts of a technical report are published.
Wide Review Working Draft
: When a Working Group believes it has addressed all comments and technical requirements, it provides the complete document for community review and announces that it is ready for wide review.
Candidate Recommendation
: The main purpose of Candidate Recommendation is to ensure that the technical report can be implemented. W3C encourages developers to use the technical report in their projects. The technical report is stable at this stage; however, it may change based on implementation experience.
W3C Recommendation (Web Standard)
: Once there is significant support for the technical report from W3C Members, the W3C Director, and the public, it is published as a Recommendation. W3C encourages widespread deployment of its Recommendations.
That was a simplified description of the process. For the definitive version, see the
W3C Process Document: W3C Technical Reports
Other resources
WAI also develops documents that support the guidelines and do not go through the process described above.
W3C Group Notes
are advisory technical reports, not standards.
WAI Resources
cover a wide range of web accessibility topics, such as
Essential Components of Web Accessibility
WCAG 2 at a Glance
, and
Easy Checks – A First Review of Web Accessibility
Get WAI news for community collaboration
To get WAI announcements of Working Drafts for review via email, LinkedIn, Mastodon, or Atom/RSS feed, see
Subscribe to WAI News
WAI’s W3C Recommendations, Group Notes, and Resources are primarily developed in
WAI Working Groups
with input from the community. WAI actively encourages broad participation from industry, disability organizations, accessibility researchers, government, and others interested in web accessibility.
Participating in WAI
describes ways that you can contribute to WAI’s accessibility work, including reviewing and commenting on WAI guidelines as they are being developed.
The best time to comment is when WAI announces Working Drafts for review
. Please send your comments early in the process, when the Working Group can most effectively address them in the developing technical report. Technical comments sent after the wide review period have less weight, and a Working Group might not be able to make substantive changes late in the process. The W3C Process Document provides more information on
Reviews and Review Responsibilities
Please share your ideas, suggestions, or comments via e-mail to the publicly-archived list
wai@w3.org
or via GitHub.
E-mail
Fork & Edit on GitHub
New GitHub Issue