Citing the latest stable version of WCAG in specifications

Hi all,

We had a long-running question about how to do this. For example, if we add
an Accessibility Considerations section to a spec, we don't want to cite
WCAG 2.1 and then have that become out-of-date now that WCAG 2.2 is out.

There are a couple of different tools used to produce specs, e.g. ReSpec [1]
and Bikeshed [2]. However, the good news is there is a common database of
citations that can be made by those tools: Specref [3]. As it happens,
Specref has a reference called "wcag" [4] which seems to be an alias for the
reference for the current version of WCAG. So currently the Specref ID
refers to the Specref reference called "WCAG22", which is of course WCAG
2.2.

Thus, in future, we can recommend people use this reference in their
"Accessibility Considerations" sections; nice.

(I discovered this because I was just checking out one of the PRs that the
WebNN folks created in response to our recent review.)

Best regards,


Matthew

[1] https://respec.org/docs/
[2] https://github.com/tabatkins/bikeshed
[3] https://www.specref.org/
[4] https://api.specref.org/bibrefs?refs=wcag

Matthew Atkinson
Head of Web Standards
Samsung R&D Institute UK
Samsung Electronics
+44 7733 238 020

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Received on Wednesday, 2 July 2025 16:03:42 UTC