Accessibility sounds like a technical box to tick, somewhere below “make the logo bigger” on the list. It is really a much plainer question: can everyone who wants to use your website actually use it? For a small business that question has a practical side, a legal side, and a short list of fixes that are neither expensive nor mysterious. Here is the plain-English version.
How many people are we talking about?
More than most owners expect. The Australian Bureau of Statistics found in its 2022 Survey of Disability, Ageing and Carers that 5.5 million Australians – 21.4% of the population – had disability, up from 4.4 million (17.7%) in 2018. That is before you count the temporary and situational cases: the customer with an arm in a sling, someone squinting at a phone in bright sun, an older visitor whose eyesight has quietly changed. Accessible design tends to help all of them at once.
Where Australian law actually sits
The relevant law is the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (Cth), which is administered by the Australian Human Rights Commission. The Commission publishes Guidelines on equal access to digital goods and services, which describe the recognised accessibility standards as “the minimum organisations should aim for” in meeting their obligations under the Act. It is worth being precise here, because there is a lot of loose talk about this online: those guidelines are guidance, not legislation. The obligation that carries legal weight is the Disability Discrimination Act itself, and the guidelines describe how to go about meeting it.
It has already been tested here
This is not an overseas concern that has yet to reach Australia. In Maguire v Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (2000), the then Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission upheld a complaint that the official Sydney 2000 Olympics website discriminated against a blind user under the Disability Discrimination Act, because the site was not accessible to him. That decision is now a quarter of a century old, which tells you how long the principle has been settled.
The standard, in four words
The reference point everyone uses is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG, published by the World Wide Web Consortium. The current version, WCAG 2.2, organises 13 guidelines under four principles: content should be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. Conformance is measured at three levels – A, AA and AAA – and mainstream Australian organisations are commonly expected to work towards Level AA. You do not need to read the specification. The four principles are enough to hold in your head: can people take the content in, can they operate the thing, can they make sense of it, and does it hold together in whatever browser or assistive technology they are using?
The common problems worth fixing first
In practice the same handful of issues turn up on small business websites over and over, and most are quick to put right:
- Images with no alt text. A screen reader has nothing to announce, so the visitor simply misses whatever the picture was saying.
- Poor colour contrast. Pale grey text on white looks elegant on a designer’s monitor and disappears on a phone in daylight.
- No visible keyboard focus. Plenty of people navigate by pressing Tab rather than using a mouse. If nothing highlights as they move, they are navigating blind.
- Unlabelled form fields. A placeholder that vanishes when you start typing is not a label, and an enquiry form nobody can complete is a lost customer.
- Headings used for size, not structure. Headings are the map a screen reader reads out. Skipping levels to get a font size scrambles it.
- Link text like “click here”. Out of context it says nothing. “Read our pricing” does.
Several of these we have written about in more detail already: the role of colour contrast in an accessible website, using alt text well, and how to build accessible forms. Contrast in particular sits inside that first WCAG principle – perceivable – which is also why the light-or-dark question is not purely a matter of taste.
A sensible place to start
You do not have to fix everything at once, and you should not try. Pick the pages that matter most – usually the home page, your main service page and the contact page – and walk through each one using only the keyboard, no mouse. Can you reach every link and button? Can you tell where you are? Then look at your text on a phone outdoors. Then check that every meaningful image has a sensible description behind it. That short pass will surface most of what is worth doing, and it costs nothing but an afternoon.
Want a hand with it?
JezNorthWeb designs, builds, manages and promotes websites for businesses across the Northern Rivers and beyond, and accessibility is part of building a site properly rather than an extra bolted on afterwards. Contact us to arrange a free consultation about your website.
