In any real-world sense, one does not have the option to forgo website accessibility standards as an Australian business. Make your site unusable for those with a disability and you are inviting legal trouble under the 1992 Disability Discrimination Act (DDA), you will put off customers and you make things more difficult than they should be. The common denominator for most businesses here is to adhere to WCAG 2.1 Level AA; it is the benchmark that is both safe and accepted, provided there is some sound testing, a plan for remediation and regular review to go with it.
Alexander Vale here. After years in tourism and customer service, and plenty of time observing how people actually get at information, I can tell you this: nobody has much to say when a site is easy to use. But they will complain if it is an exercise in futility, or if making a booking feels like you are trying to push a trolley in the sand on the beach. Being accessible is good compliance, to be sure, but it is also just good manners and the way to do business.
Why it is important
Some put accessibility in the technical pile to be sorted out down the track. A mistake, generally speaking. Your website is where your customers enquire, book, pay, put in a request or talk to your staff; access to it is access to your business. For assistance, consider consulting with expert web developers in Hobart.
This is true whether you are a national concern or a small local outfit with two employees and a dog at the front desk. It holds for retail, health, education, professional and government services alike, on desktop as well as mobile and tablet.
Compliance and the commercial case
An accessible design allows more to get their work done, be it through screen readers, voice input, high contrast or keyboard navigation. Then there are the older user, someone with a temporary impediment or a spotty mobile connection, or anyone who has to read your site in poor light with a coffee in one hand.
You would be wrong to think it is for a very small audience. The ABS has made it clear that a lot of Australians have a disability, and others face situational ones. Put aside the statistics and the commercial reality is obvious: if your site is not usable, some will be gone before you know what hit them.
The law in Australia
It is not as dramatic as some consultants would have you believe, but neither is it open to interpretation. While you will not find a “website accessibility act” per se in Australia, online services are subject to anti-discrimination rules.
The DDA is the governing law. It will not give you a line by line on heading structure or colour contrast, but it makes discrimination in the provision of goods and services unlawful, and a website is part of that equation.
Putting the DDA into practice
When the topic of web accessibility and the DDA comes up, it is a question of whether a business has been reasonable in affording equal access to its online services. The Australian Human Rights Commission does not see digital access as an afterthought.
So an unreadable PDF, a video sans captions or a form you cannot fill in with a keyboard will cause problems. The law is based on principle, which has its merits and its frustrations. Merit in that it is relevant to new technology. Frustrating because there is no one-page answer for those wanting to tick a box and be finished with it.
Taking reasonable steps
Organisations are expected to put in place recognised standards, test with users, put right any material barriers and keep at it. Once a problem is pointed out, ignoring it is not a defensible position.
For the official policy context, look to Digital.gov.au for the Australian Government’s guidance on service design and digital standards. It is aimed at government but private firms will find the thinking current and practical enough to follow.
WCAG 2.1 AA
Then there is the matter of a technical target. WCAG 2.1 Level AA is what is used for compliance across Australia in the main, and for procurement and audits it is the clearest standard to have. Put it in plain English as Alexander Vale would: content has to be robust, understandable, operable and perceivable. But strip away the jargon and what it comes down to is that a person should be able to locate and read material, work the controls and get on with their business without the site making an issue of it.
WCAG 2.1 Level AA
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines have three tiers. Level A is the floor. You could call Level AAA aspirational; for much of your content it is not a practical proposition. Most Australian organisations will want to make Level AA their benchmark, the sort of middle ground everyone accepts.
In a WCAG 2.1 Level AA context you are looking at alt text on images, headings that are unambiguous, visible focus states, keyboard navigation, forms and links that mean something, logical order to the page, zoom and screen reader support, to name a few. There is also an expectation of semantic HTML and a judicious application of ARIA attributes, not just visual styling.
Where Sites Go Wrong
You will find the mess here. It is all too common for a business to think they have done their bit by putting in a widget or a toolbar, or perhaps an automated scan. That is not how it works. An automated tool is no use against a custom menu that holds up a keyboard user, inaccessible PDFs Australia-wide, or a form with broken labels.
The transgressions are only to be expected: generic divs for buttons, placeholder text in lieu of a label, Word documents turned into untagged PDFs, carousels one cannot stop, video sans captions and text on an image with little contrast. Very common and, to be blunt, rough stuff.
DSS and Government Standards
Then there is the Digital Service Standard. While the Australia framework is for government services its reach extends further. Any business doing public work or taking a leaf out of the public sector’s book on design ought to be familiar with it.
The DSS is about building accessible services and cutting out the friction, testing and designing with the user in mind. It is not some exercise in technical compliance theatre but an integral part of service quality.
A Case for Private Business
Your business may not be answerable to the DSS but it is a good way to put accessibility in line with how you deliver a service and makes for simpler decisions. One is better off wondering if a customer can see a task through to completion than whether one is obliged to do so. In utilities, finance, education or tourism where self-service online is de rigueur, a payment process or booking path that leaves users high and dry is not a minor glitch. A failure of service.
AS1428
One does not need to look hard to see AS1428 standards being misapprehended in web circles. They are of consequence in Australia but AS1428 is a standard for the built environment, for physical mobility and access in premises. It applies to a building’s signage, fixtures and circulation spaces. Not websites. The two are conflated because they are both under the umbrella of accessibility but they are not the same thing.
For a hotel or clinic with a digital and physical presence, AS1428 is as pertinent as web accessibility. A visitor attraction or cellar door should consider if patrons can make their way to the premises and independently enquire or book via the website before they get there.
Yet often a business will tout the step-free access to the building while the online form is unusable without a mouse. You might as well have paved the way to the lookout and then put a lock on the car park gate.
An Audit
To gauge the workload and risk, an audit is the quickest route. It establishes a baseline and tells you what needs fixing so you are not guessing.
There is a maturing of accessibility testing in Australia though many still put their faith in the quick and inexpensive automated tools. Do not make that mistake. A proper audit will mix those with manual expert review and assistive technology. Automated software will pick up on low contrast, heading issues or missing alt text and some ARIA faults. For the rest – to see if the content is sensible, to check error messaging, form behaviour and screen readers – you need a manual eye. And user testing to put it to the test: can the task be done?
One can put in weeks to make the home page look its best and yet a blind user is stymied at the first hurdle of a booking form. I have been on teams that did just that. It is for those kind of surprises that an accessibility audit is indispensable.
| Area of check | Review | Typical failure | Priority |
| Navigation | Skip links, focus order, keyboard access | High (menus are no good without a mouse) | High |
| Content | Plain language, reading order, headings and link text | High (visuals with nothing in the way of semantic HTML) | High |
| Images | Alt text and how you handle decorative images | Medium (alt text that is missing or does not mean anything) | Medium |
| Forms | Status updates, error messages, instructions and labels | High (labels that are only placeholders) | High |
| Media | Controls, transcripts and captions | Medium (a video sans captions) | Medium |
| Documents | Link text, reading order, headings, tagged PDFs | High (screen readers cannot make head nor tail of a scanned PDF) | High |
Tools And Providers Of Note
There are tools like AccessibilityChecker.org to help with an initial review, but one should view them as a torch rather than your whole map. Overlay type products from ReciteMe and the like may give users some options but they are no substitute for code that is compliant. In Australia you will hear much of Butterfly and Includ in discussions of accessibility; their work in inclusive design and digital inclusion is well regarded. Then there are the big players, Telstra and Tourism Australia for instance, who have set the standard for what to expect from a digital service, particularly where there is a lot of content and traffic.
When working with developers, do not mince words over the scope. Put it to them: do they test with nothing but a keyboard? Are ARIA attributes validated? Can they put right an accessible PDFs Australia projects? From a web developer of repute in Hobart, Sydney or Perth one expects a practical response, not showmanship.
Put Things Right
An audit is over and there is no need to be in a panic and start afresh with the site if you do not have to. Prioritised remediation will see most businesses put in place a marked improvement in access.
Concentrate on what is of consequence to the user and the bottom line, be it a contact form, the checkout, key pages for your services or a document to download. All the finesse in the world on a homepage is of scant value when the payment process is as flat as a pancake for a mouse user and unworkable for anyone else.
A checklist for the build
What the content and development teams ought to be doing:
- Headings, tables, buttons, lists and landmarks in semantic HTML.
- No keyboard traps and full navigation with visible focus.
- Alt text that has meaning, and decorative images left alone.
- Text and controls must satisfy the contrast ratio requirements, as do focus indicators.
- Forms with proper labels and field grouping, and instructions on how to recover from an error.
- ARIA is for when native HTML is up to the task.
- Video gets captioned, transcripts put in place and auto-play is eschewed.
- Make your PDFs accessible or put the important stuff on an HTML page.
What To Put First
For a day’s work you might make a start on the homepage, top nav, the contact page, a path to book or check out and the PDF that is most in demand. You are covering all the bases for support, conversion and movement. Where forms are the lifeblood of the business they take precedence, period.
A beginner would be hard pressed to do a code-level overhaul of a site that is heavily customised. If three agencies have come and gone leaving mystery scripts and old templates and plugins cobbled together, you are treading carefully. What should be a straightforward fix becomes a bush track in the rain. Plan the work and budget for it.
Stay Compliant
Do not think of accessibility as something to put on the to-do list and be done with. A redesign, a new campaign, an update to the menu or a plugin, any of these can put barriers back in place. The better run organisations have it in their governance: ownership is clear, there are rules for content and procurement, things are tested before they go live and a mechanism is in place for a user to flag an issue.
Accessibility Statements and Remediation
A statement put out by an Australian business has to be current, specific and above all honest. It is there to lay out one’s commitment and the standard being strived for, to make known any limitations that are yet to be resolved and to give contact information for those who come across a barrier of some sort. Tell users what will happen once they have made a report.
There is no point in using the statement as a glossy shield; spin is detectable from a kilometre off. Be forthright if there are sections of the site under repair and put timeframes on it where you can. As for a remediation plan, it ought to prioritise issues according to the effort of implementation, legal risk, how much traffic is involved and the impact on the user.
The Rhythm of Ongoing Monitoring
What works best is to have a system of quarterly scans done automatically, with manual review of the key journeys following a major release and then a more comprehensive test on an annual basis that makes use of assistive technology. You may find that in a high-change setting like a large service or ecommerce site more frequent checks are called for.
Then there is the matter of cost. A small business can expect to put down a few thousand AUD for a thorough review but enterprise remediation will be a steeper proposition given the document volumes and integrations. The audit is not where the expense lies, it is in putting right years of neglect.
In short
For what passes as good practice in Australia at present, one should be targeting WCAG 2.1 Level AA and be clear on the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (DDA) obligations. Make the Digital Service Standard Australia your quality measure and see accessibility as part of the service design, not something to be patched up at the eleventh hour.
Alexander Vale would tell you most put it off until it is too late and then feign surprise at the length of the clean-up. Get on with your highest-traffic tasks, have real users test them and put out an accessibility statement in plain English. Complying in this way is less of an ordeal than having an angry customer because they have been locked out.
Some Common Questions
Australian businesses have a tendency to ask these, often after a redesign is up and running and it is noticed the dunny door opens the wrong way.
Website accessibility guidelines in Australia?
You will not find a single mandatory code for private business, but WCAG 2.1 Level AA is the accepted benchmark. And do not forget the DDA which comes into play when a website stands in the way of goods or services.
Standards for web accessibility?
WCAG, typically at Level AA, is what is used. Some are adopting newer versions of the guideline if it suits them but for policy and audits, 2.1 is the safest baseline unless you are bound by a sector rule or contract.
And AS1428?
That is a Standards Australia series for the built environment, covering access and mobility in buildings, ramps, signage and so on. It is necessary for public-facing premises but does not stand in for a web standard. Though many organisations will need to think about both physical and digital accessibility, they are different things.
Is an accessibility statement a must for the small business?
It is a sensible thing to do regardless of size. The wording of the law is open to interpretation in places but a statement that is easy to come by demonstrates intent and a compliance approach an Australian business can put its name to.
