Don't Believe Everything You Read
Misinformation is quite the thing these days. It has been for at least a decade which is as far as I can think back to the first time I saw misinformation or disinformation. It probably (and undoubtedly) has existed since the "modern" internet came about (let's call it Web 2.0 for the lack of a better term).
I'll share what I posted on LinkedIn a few weeks back.
Stumbled upon more misinformation about WCAG 3 and I can tell you with 100% certainty, the same goes with APCA, that they are both exploratory and public beta respectively. Not at all close to being standard.
With regard to WCAG 3: “Status: Exploratory Draft. The May 2024 WCAG 3 Working Draft includes potential outcomes that we are exploring. The final set of outcomes in WCAG 3 will be different from this draft. Outcomes will be edited, added, combined, and removed.”
The key words there being “exploratory draft”. Until such time it is a “W3C Recommendation” and until such time you go to read it and it states in the “Status of this document” section, “W3C recommends the wide deployment of this specification as a standard for the Web.” Then it will have been approved for publication and use.
With regard to APCA: “APCA W3 is in public beta” and on the GitHub repo page, under the disclaimer, it is even stated:
“APCA is being evaluated as a replacement for WCAG 2 contrast math for future standards and guidelines, however, standards that will be incorporating APCA are still developmental.”
The key word there is “developmental “. Meaning “in development”, not ready for broader public use.
The current recommendations are the WCAG 2.2 guidelines and the current WCAG color-contrast scoring method.
There is work being done by lots of great people in the W3C to develop WCAG 3 and APCA but they aren't at all close to published work, unanimous approval, or recommendation status.
So, anyone telling you or posting and proclaiming that WCAG 3 and APCA are the standard, are ready for use, are accepted at any official level, are being used by governments at any level (local through federal) are not well-informed, not knowing or reading any of the documentation, or just flat out serving up misinformation and aren't aware of the confusion they are causing.
TL;DR: WCAG 3 and APCA are not approved standards and won't be for many, many years.
Note: WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) and APCA (Accessible Perceptual Contrast Algorithm)
After that, I figured I may not see anything else for a little while, but I always prove myself wrong. Today in my online travels I once again found more misinformation. I urge you or anyone to call this out and educate people that are unknowingly spreading this around (or maybe knowingly, you never know) and correct it before it becomes a huge problem like most of the issues we see today with the spreading of mis and disinformation.