WCAG 3's 2026 draft: what it changes about describing images

If you write image descriptions for a living, the short answer is that nothing you do this week changes. WCAG 3 is still an incomplete draft; the W3C says on its WCAG 3 introduction page that it isn't expected to be a finished standard for a few more years, and that WCAG 2 won't be deprecated for at least several years after that.

What's worth knowing is the shape. In WCAG 2, everything about images sits under a single success criterion — 1.1.1 Non-text Content, which asks for "a text alternative that serves the equivalent purpose." The March 2026 WCAG 3 draft breaks that one rule into three, and the split maps almost exactly onto the decisions you already make about every image.

One rule becomes three jobs

Under Guideline 2.1.1, Image alternatives, the published Working Draft of March 3, 2026 lists three core requirements: non-decorative images are detectable, decorative images are programmatically hidden, and equivalent text alternatives are available for images that convey content.

Read as a workflow, that is: does the image register at all, does it need words, and are the words any good. The middle question is the one people skip — deciding when to write nothing is a real step, not an omission, and the draft now gives it its own line.

Don't build anything around the number

You'll see requirement counts quoted in write-ups of this draft. Be careful with them. The March 2026 Working Draft holds 153 requirements — 92 core and 61 supplemental — across 44 guidelines. The editor's draft, which also carries the items still marked exploratory, is already past 200. Both figures were true when we counted them and neither will be true for long.

The image guideline itself shows the drift. In the editor's draft it has already grown a fourth core requirement, separating "a text alternative exists" from "the text alternative is equivalent," plus an exploratory one about naming the image type. That's a working group thinking out loud, not a spec you can plan a quarter around.

The one thing worth stealing today

The draft's test procedure for image alternatives is genuinely useful, and it works under WCAG 2 right now. Remove or hide the image, put your alt text in its place, and check that the meaning survives. Then, if the image contains words that matter to understanding it, check those words made it into the text.

That second half catches the most common failure we see. Graphics with words baked in fail it constantly — the description names the format and never says what it said. Same with charts and infographics, where a label passes as an alt tag and fails as an alternative.

What to do until then

Keep conforming to WCAG 2.1 Level AA. That's the standard regulators actually point at, including the ADA Title II deadline in 2027. Nothing in the WCAG 3 draft suggests a good WCAG 2 text alternative would suddenly fail; the vocabulary is being reorganized, not the judgment underneath it.

And if you'd rather test your work against something more concrete than a draft standard, how screen readers announce your images shows what a description sounds like read aloud. That test never goes out of date, whatever the requirements end up being called.