Skip to main content

Compliance

Does your website need to be accessible?

Accessibility gets treated as either a legal threat or a nice-to-have, and it's really neither. Around one in five Australians lives with disability, the Disability Discrimination Act has applied to websites for a quarter of a century, and most of what's required is unremarkable competent development that also makes the site better for everyone else.

Rather just ask someone? Talk to us

In short

The Disability Discrimination Act 1992 covers services offered to the public, and that has been understood to include websites since Maguire v SOCOG in 2000. There's no prescribed technical standard for private business, but WCAG 2.2 Level AA is the accepted benchmark and the one Australian government digital services are held to.

This is a plain-English summary written by developers, not legal advice. It is general information and does not account for your circumstances. For anything that turns on your specific obligations, talk to a lawyer.

What is WCAG, and what does Level AA mean?
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are the international standard, published by the W3C, organised around four principles: content must be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. Success criteria come at three levels — A is the minimum, AA is the widely adopted benchmark for public-facing sites, and AAA is stricter than most sites can meet in full. WCAG 2.2 is the current version. When a tender or a policy says 'accessible', it almost always means WCAG 2.2 Level AA.

What actually works

  1. The law is about discrimination, not about a checklist

    The DDA doesn't specify HTML. It makes it unlawful to discriminate in providing goods and services, and a website that a blind customer can't use to buy what everyone else can buy is the situation it contemplates. WCAG is the practical way to demonstrate you've addressed it.

  2. Maguire v SOCOG is the reason this is settled

    In 2000 the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission found the Sydney Olympics website breached the DDA, with substantial damages awarded. Australian businesses have had a quarter of a century of notice that websites are covered.

  3. Government and enterprise will simply ask

    Public sector procurement and larger corporate tenders routinely require a WCAG conformance statement. For a lot of businesses this arrives as a commercial requirement long before it arrives as a legal one.

  4. Most failures are the same handful of things

    Text that doesn't contrast enough with its background, images with no alt text, forms whose fields aren't labelled, things that only work with a mouse, and headings used for size rather than structure. Fix those five and you've addressed the bulk of real-world problems.

  5. Automated tools find about a third of it

    Lighthouse and axe are genuinely useful and they cannot detect whether alt text is meaningful, whether the tab order makes sense, or whether an error message tells someone what went wrong. Use them, then test with a keyboard and a screen reader.

  6. Overlay widgets are not a fix

    The one-line scripts promising instant compliance are widely rejected by the accessibility community, and have themselves been the subject of complaints. They don't repair underlying markup. Spend the money on the markup.

  7. It overlaps almost entirely with quality

    Proper headings help search engines. Labelled forms convert better. Sufficient contrast helps anyone reading outdoors. Keyboard operability makes the site usable on more devices. Very little of this is accessibility-specific cost.

  8. Start with the paths that matter

    You don't have to fix everything at once. Make the routes that carry your business — find, enquire, book, buy — genuinely usable first, then work outwards.

The first pass

Testable in an afternoon on most small sites, and it covers the majority of real barriers people hit.

  • Every meaningful image has alt text that says what it conveys; decorative images have empty alt
  • Body text contrasts at least 4.5:1 with its background
  • Every form field has a visible, associated label
  • The whole site can be operated with a keyboard alone, in a sensible order
  • The focused element is always visibly highlighted
  • Headings describe structure — one h1, no levels skipped
  • Links say where they go, rather than 'click here'
  • Video has captions; audio has a transcript
  • Errors are described in text, not by colour alone
  • The page still works at 200% zoom
  • The page has a language attribute set

When this isn't your problem

A full WCAG 2.2 AA audit and remediation is a real project and it isn't where a five-page site with three visitors a day should spend its money. Do the first-pass list — it's cheap and it removes most actual barriers. Commission the full audit when you're selling to government or enterprise, when the site is central to your revenue, or simply when you'd rather not exclude a fifth of the population.

Want us to look at it?

Send us your site and what you're trying to improve. We'll tell you what we'd do first — including when the honest answer is that you don't need us.

Email

jayson@pixelapps.com.au

Location

Macedon Ranges, Victoria

Serving clients across Australia

Common questions

The Disability Discrimination Act 1992 applies to services offered to the public, and websites have been understood to be covered since Maguire v SOCOG in 2000. There's no prescribed technical standard for private business, but WCAG 2.2 Level AA is the accepted benchmark, and Australian government services are held to a WCAG AA requirement.

Level AA of WCAG 2.2. Level A leaves real barriers in place, and Level AAA is stricter than most sites can meet across all content. AA is what tenders, policies and accessibility statements almost always mean.

Not as a substitute for accessible markup. They're widely criticised by disability advocates and accessibility professionals, and have themselves attracted complaints. They can't fix missing labels or a broken heading structure — the underlying code is where the work is.

For a small business site, a focused review and remediation of the main paths is typically $1,500 to $5,000. A formal WCAG 2.2 AA audit with a written conformance statement, of the kind procurement asks for, is more — and worth scoping against what's actually being required of you.

Also worth a look

Last reviewed . Figures are indicative Australian ranges, not quotes.