Government Digital Accessibility Forum 2025

Grant Carpenter: Kia ora koutou.

Nau mai piki mai ki tenei hui, haere mai, haere mai, mihi mai.

Good morning and thank you for joining us and welcome to the Government Disability Accessibility Forum.

We’ve got a range of different speakers this morning.

It’s great to have you all here. I know that you’ll have lots of questions, so I’m hoping that you can get those into the Q&A as we progress, but there’s lots going on, so it’s gonna be a great session.

I just wanna start us with a karakia.

Whakataka te hau ki te uru
Whakataka te hau ki te tonga
Kia mākinakina ki uta
Kia mātaratara ki tai
E hī ake ana te ata kura
He tio, he huka, he hau hū
Haumi e! Hui e! Taiki e!

E mihi atu ki hoa mahi. E mihi ana ki te mana whenua o Te Whanganui a Tara, a Te Awa me Te Ngāti Toa Rangatira. Kei te mihi, kei te mihi, kei te mihi.

Ko Grant Carpenter toku ingoa.

I want to acknowledge all those who are helping with this session and the Tangata Whenua. It is great to have you all here.

I’m gonna hand over to my colleague Jason Kiss, who is part as a web standards consultant here in the GCDO. He’s just gonna tell us a little bit about how the Government Digital Accessibility Forum started and what it’s about.

Over to you, Jason

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Jason Kiss: Tēnā koe, Grant. Kia ora koutou.

Alongside my colleague, Katherine Barcham, who some of you will know, we form the Government Chief Digital Officer’s Web Standards team.

So we look after the Web Standards, one of which, of course, is the Web Accessibility Standard.

So welcome again to GDAF. This is really just an opportunity for public and private sectors to come together and learn about the work happening to make government digital services accessible.

Today, the theme for GDAF is accessible services for everyone. As more services go digital, disabled people must be able to access and use them. What do government agencies need to do to achieve this and how can they acknowledge and accommodate disabled customers in the services that they build?

So to help make this event accessible, we have two NZSL, New Zealand Sign Language Interpreters. These are Jodine Williams and Phillipa Shatford. They should be spotlighted for you, but if you can’t see them, you can pin them on your screen.

We also have live captioning. Directions are on the screen now, but have also been added to the chat.

We’ll add those to the chat as we go through the event. But in order to access those live captions, go to caseviewnet.com or search Google for caseviewnet and click on caseviewnet browser edition and then log in with the session code P3S3HS. Doesn’t matter about case, uppercase, it’ll automatically turn that into. The password is GDAF, G-D-A-F, all uppercase. And then you add your name and then you’ll be able to monitor the live captions in a browser that way.

So thanks again for joining us, GDAF. Grant, back to you.

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Grant Carpneter: Thanks, Jason.

I just wanna tell you a little bit about how we’re gonna run things and what we’re doing today.

We have a range of really good speakers who wanna tell you all about the different pieces of work they’re doing around disability.

We’re gonna start off with Paul James, the Chief Digital Officer for Government, and then we’re gonna go to Paula Tesoriero who’s the secretary for Whaikaha Ministry for the Disabled. And we’re hoping to have five minutes of questions when Paula is finished. So if you’ve got questions that you’d like to ask her, if you could put those into the Q&A, that would be lovely. Thank you.

And then after our keynote speakers, we’re going to move on to, we have three agencies presenting to us: the National Emergency Management Agency, the Ministry for Social Development, and Citizens Advice Bureau.

So we have great speakers from those agencies gonna tell us some of their work, all about some of their work.

After that, we’ll take a five-minute break, and then we’ll come back to a panel discussion.

Now for that panel discussion, we’re looking forward to you putting those questions in. We’ll have a chance to interview, discuss, and talk about those disability things that are important to you. So please, Q&A, that’d be great.

I’m gonna hand over to Paul now. Welcome Paul.

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Paul James: Ngā mihi ki a koe Grant.

Mōrena koutou, e mihi ana kia koutou e huihui mai nei i tēnei ra ki te whakamana tēnei kaupapa whakahirahira.

Morning, everyone. Welcome to everyone on this zui meeting and thank you all for joining to support this important kaupapa.

It’s my absolute pleasure as Government Chief Digital officer to be here with you this morning to support this event and to open it and to thank you for your attendance and for everyone who’s participating.

Really important to acknowledge that this event today, the Government Digital Accessibility Forum is happening on Global Accessibility Awareness Day. So this is a day when across the world people stop to connect and talk about accessibility. And it’s important that we do that here inside the New Zealand Public Service as well.

As GCDO, we’ve always been concerned about accessibility of digital services. It’s woven into our key strategic documents, including the digital strategy for public service. And it’s part of our work programme and something that we very much focus on and see as important.

So for example, we recently updated the New Zealand Government Web Accessibility standard to align with international requirements for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, version 2.2. No shortage of words in this work, but it’s important and it’s work that we have actively underway.

We’re also working on a new Digital Accessibility Standard that will apply not just to websites, which is the current standard, but also apply to native mobile apps and Office documents like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF. So adopting that standard will start to align us with jurisdictions like Canada, Australia and European countries.

We’re also really proud of the Centralised Web Accessibility Checker, or CWAC. This is a tool that scans government websites for accessibility errors that can be detected automatically by software.

This is a really easy and cost effective way for us to get a consistent indicative data on how agencies are addressing accessibility to give them pathways to address that accessibility and for us to better monitor that accessibility.

We know that automated testing is only a small part of the picture and manual testing is always required. Real people with real eyes. And over time we expect to see a reduction in the number of accessibility areas that that tool identifies. And eventually our goal is to zero accessibility barriers.

We’re seeing lots and lots of opportunities to improve accessibility across the digital system. Last year, I announced a new all of government Service Modernisation Roadmap. This is a really critical tool for us in terms of digitising government. It’s a three-year cross-government work programme focused on delivering more unified, more user-focused customer experiences across government digital services. The new Digital Accessibility Standard I mentioned is one of the initiatives on that roadmap. So accessibility is baked into the roadmap.

We’re also underway with a refreshed service design standard and inclusivity and accessibility are gonna be embedded as core principles into that service design standard. So when people are starting to design new services, they start with thinking about inclusivity and accessibility.

And we keep promoting access across the public sector of other accessibility tools, things that can help such as Form Builder. So the tool, built by our MBIE colleagues, which makes it much easier for agencies to create forms that are accessible and have accessibility designed in.

It’s very hard to talk about digital these days without talking about AI, artificial intelligence. It’s clearly another area that offers potential to enable accessibility and for disabled people to live more independently and participate in society on an equitable basis through that accessibility. But equally, we know that AI has potential for harm and it could do the opposite if we don’t consider and include accessibility and also the perspectives of disabled people throughout the creation and use of AI. We’re early in our journey on AI in the public sector is the reality, but we are starting and it’s important that we do so in a cautious and careful way. That’s why, with input from Whaikaha, we’ve a section on accessibility in our recently released Responsible AI Guidance for the Public Service. You can find this guidance on digital.govt.nz.

That’s a brief scan of some of our work, but I wanted to give you a sense not just of our commitment to accessibility, but that it’s real and is work that we’re doing aimed at improving and responding to accessibility.

And the theme for today is accessible services for everyone.

Surely you’ll hear from Paula, as Grant said, my colleague, friend and the Secretary of Whaikaha will give the opening address.

Also really pleased to have NEMA and MSD join us to talk about their efforts to create digital accessible services. Those are services that real New Zealanders access on a daily basis and again, getting accessibility baked in at the start.

We know that while my focus is on digital and it’s the focus of the Government Chief Digital Officer function, we need to remember that not everyone can or wants to interact with government digitally. So we’re also joined today by Sacha Green from Citizens Advice Bureau who’ll bring a perspective on digital inclusion and digital exclusion.

I’d like to finish up and hand over with a bit of a challenge. The challenge is for everyone, but especially for leaders involved in delivering services to treat accessibility as a non-negotiable.

Want all of us to think about how we support the services we provide, as the public sector, to New Zealanders, to meet accessibility standards, to be accessible to all New Zealanders.

I’ve just come from the fortnightly meeting of all public sector CEs where, as part of that, I let them know about this forum, the fact that I’d be speaking, as with Paula and NEMA and MSD, just a reminder for them to be thinking back to accessibility, which is their responsibility as CEs for the services that they provide.

It’s my pleasure now to hand over to Paula. Welcome, Paula. Great to have you here today.

Ngā mihi ki a koutou.

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Paula Tesoriero: Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou katoa.

Ko Paula Tesoriero toku ingoa. Ko Te Timu Whakarae ahau e te Manatū Whaikaha The Ministry of Disabled People. No reira, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa. Talofa lava, kia orana and warm Pacific greetings.

I’m Paula Tesoriero, Chief Executive of Whaikaha.

My sign name is this, which is two bicycle pedals moving in a forward direction.

And I am sitting with a blurred screen behind me. I’m wearing a headset and I have a very light blue and white striped shirt with a black, sort of design around the sleeve. And I have short, very light brown hair sort of swept to one side.

Thank you Paul for your introduction and outline of the great work that is underway and for you and your team being a great ally of the disability community. So thank you for that.

And thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak today about a topic that not just impacts how we interact with technology, but how we participate in society itself.

For many disabled people, the promise of a digital world offers so much yet remains unfulfilled because of the barriers that are built into the very systems that are meant to connect us.

So today,I want to talk abo ut how we make sure that disabled people can benefit from the limitless opportunities presented through digital inclusion.

Jason, thank you for the way that you talked about this particular event being accessible. And you know, those things are so important to the disability community and for people to be able to participate in events like this. So I look forward to this type of event and the way in which it’s being set up, being the norm for the way that the public and private sectors do our work.

At its heart, digital inclusion means all members of society have what they need to fully participate in the digital world. For this to happen, they need access to services, have the skills and confidence to engage online and be safe whilst navigating the online world.

When those things are in place, everyone can move forward together, making the most of the very systems that are there to support our lives, giving us access to employment, to educate us and to connect us.

So what’s stopping us from this inclusive and accessible level of digital connection?

In Aotearoa, digital exclusion is still a reality for many. The 2023 Household Disability Survey run by our colleagues at Stats NZ found that one in six people in New Zealand identify as being disabled. Of those, 62% use assistive technology, yet 28% had unmet needs.

That’s over 200,000 people who still don’t have the equipment to access digital tools.

And we know that digital exclusion leads to exclusion in other spheres of life: education, employment, health and social participation.

Disabled people already experience barriers in those areas and so digital inclusion makes it much better to access these areas.

Research from the government’s digital inclusion strategy revealed that many disabled people found website content hard to access or navigate, with accessibility standards often being ignored: Easy Read, New Zealand Sign Language, or captioned video.

Some people felt discouraged from even trying. Others had to rely on friends, whānau or support workers, not because they didn’t understand the content but because the technology failed to meet their needs.

You might be interested in the report that Westpac bank did on disability and inclusion in banking, which reveals some pretty stark statistics on how disabled people respond when information isn’t accessible to them.

The report showed 71% of disabled people will shop elsewhere if a website has accessibility barriers and 75% would choose to pay more to purchase the exact item from a more accessible website.

Makes sense. I would love for New Zealand to have more information in this area.

We can certainly look to Australia who has done some research on the economic benefit of closing the digital divide in Australia, which is a whopping 467 million annually.

We know in New Zealand we need to grow our economy and this is one area that benefits would be noticed fast, not just in terms of disabled people contributing to the retail industry as consumers, but also growing employment rates for disabled people.

This is a good motivator for the corporate world and one that can be shared more widely. The disability dollar can be a big one.

And it’s really, really important that when we think about growing our economy with respect to disabled people, that we think about having disabled people both as consumers and therefore able to access the private sector and the public sector services, but also as employees of organisations.

As the Chief Executive of Whaikaha, I’m committed that we play our role in helping make things accessible.

So this year, just to bring you up to speed with some of the things that we are doing, we’re working on updating the Accessibility Charter to increase the amount of public information being accessible.

We’re also the lead coordinator in translating alternate formats across Government. So that’s things like Braille, large print, audio, Easy Read, and New Zealand Sign Language.

Whilst the website might be accessible from a digital inclusion perspective, all information on the platform needs to be accessible to all disabled people. So there’s no point in necessarily having an accessible website.

But then once you are through, you find that actually you can’t access information in New Zealand Sign Language, for example.

So this means consulting with really diverse groups within the disability community and ensuring that you’re building accessibility in early.

I like the way that Paul talked about really baking in accessibility from the very beginning. It’s much easier to do that than try and retrofit later.

Sometimes when I get emails from Paul, he sets out asks of chief executives when sharing new information or approaches. So when replicating his approach, here are some recommendations when it comes to digital inclusion that I am asking listeners to commit to today.

First is to become an ally by proactively enforcing the Web Accessibility Standards that Paul touched on. Earlier this year, a new version of the standard was introduced and Paul briefly touched on this.

Secondly, co-design digital services with disabled people. If you design it in from the start, you will get better outcomes.

Offer more digital skills training not just to individuals but to communities. Knowing how to use accessibility tools or make the most of AI in a safe way is critical.

Fourthly, make technology affordable and available to your staff and to your customers.

Fifth, support disabled people in employment, not just to get jobs but to thrive in them. And this includes making sure that as an employer your technology can create an inclusive workplace.

I really like Paul’s ask, which I absolutely endorse, which is making accessibility non-negotiable. If we can achieve that, we have a far more productive and inclusive Aotearoa.

Just think how many disabled people will be able to thrive when they can access digital platforms and the support, education and connection that come with it.

Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou katoa.

Those are my intro comments and I’m more than happy to take any questions.

Thanks, Grant.

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Grant Carpenter: Kia ora Paula. Thank you for that.

We have been getting some questions while you were talking so I’ll go straight into them if that’s okay ’cause we have a very small amount of time.

"Besides economic arguments, why should public and private organisations deliver accessible products and services?"

That’s come through the Q&A.

Paula Tesoriero: Great question.

So there are so many reasons and I think I touched briefly on, you know, if you think about how much we rely on digital platforms these days to connect with friends and family and to purchase things and just to be able to connect with people, actually if we don’t make those things accessible, we really do exclude potentially one in six New Zealanders from being able to just participate in life.

And you know, that’s on top of the economic side of things, which is actually disabled people thriving as employees and as consumers of products and services in New Zealand.

Grant Carpenter: Very much about that cohesive working society, isn’t it?

And we all (indistinct), thanks.

Thank you Paula. And we did have another question.

"Where do you see the big opportunities to increase government accessibility at the moment from your perspective?"

Paula Tesoriero: Great question, Grant.

So look, I think there’s a few key areas.

One, making sure that all government agencies comply with the government web standards and in particular the new accessibility standards. And so we’re doing some work with Paul’s team on really helping agencies to understand where they might be falling short of making their websites accessible.

But it also goes beyond that, which is, if you really think about accessibility standards, it’s about making sure that once you are into the website, that actually all the forms are accessible.

So things like drop-down menus don’t necessarily work for all members of our community. Different forms that are produced don’t necessarily work.

So it’s sort of one thing getting sort of in the front door of the website. It’s quite another if actually all the things behind it are not accessible. So that’s, you know, huge opportunity there.

And you know, we can’t go beyond really trying to think about the future world of AI and the huge opportunities that offers a disability community. As Paul noted though, being very cautious about making sure that algorithms and things don’t work in such a way as to disadvantage disabled people and indeed other vulnerable communities.

So really striking that balance right is important, but not, you know, not to dismiss the idea that AI offers huge opportunity for disabled people.

And then I think finally, you know, for government and indeed private sector, really making things accessible in those alternate formats is really important because again, you can make something digital in writing, but then making New Zealand Sign Language interpretations available, you know, is that sort of ultimate step of making things accessible.

Grant Carpenter: Thanks, Paula.

I have one more question and I know we’re short of time, but we have a lot of people that are working at the coalface trying to deliver services across government and inside this forum at the moment and they recognise that inside their environments there are things that they’re working through that are quite hardened and they’re a little bit harder to do some of those extra things that we’d really like to.

"Have you got any suggestions or ideas for things that they could do at the coalface just to make services more accessible, simple things or easier things that don’t challenge necessarily the system?"

Paula Tesoriero: Yeah, again, another great question.

Look, nothing beats asking the person that you’re interacting with what they need.

And you know, often we overlook that in our busy world or we think the systems and things that we’re working with will be okay for people we’re interacting with.

You know, I always encourage people to ask the person in front of them, you know, what is it that they need? And generally, when we do that, we can typically find a way through to accommodate those needs.

And you know, I would encourage people to get in touch with us at Whaikaha, the Ministry of Disabled People.

And also I’ve never heard it referred to as GDAF, but I have this morning.

So both GDAF and Whaikaha, please reach out.

More than happy to help provide tips and be a source of useful advice.

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Grant Carpenter: Thank you, Paula. I realise we’ve run out of time.

There are lots of questions starting to flow through now, so it’s great and I think people have lots of questions.

You may get them fired across to you at various stages from different people, but we really appreciate what you’ve been able to say and to help us with guiding folks through this journey to make government more accessible for everybody.

Thank you so much.

Paula Tesoriero: Thank you.

Grant Carpenter: You take care.

Very good. Look, I’d like to move us.

Thank you, Paula.

I’d like to move us now onto the presentations.

We have these three presentations, one from the National Emergency Management Agency, one from Ministry of Social Development and then the last one from the Citizens Advice Bureau.

I’d just like to remind you, I know a lot of people have just joined us, that if you do have questions, can you put them into the Q&A?

We’re getting them flowing through now so it’s great and we’re starting to pick them up and then the team that are here feed them to me so that I don’t get too confused with all the things that are going on.

Look, I’d like to hand us over now to Zsenai Logan. Zsenai is from the National Emergency Management Agency, so NEMA. They’ve been working to make their services more accessible over the last little while. And I know that she’s had some challenges with that, but she seems to work out a process that I think is quite useful for everyone.

Welcome, Zsenai.

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Zsenai Logan: Yeah.

Get my slides up first, shall I?

Well... All right.

Hoping we can see that. Can we, Grant?

Perfect.

Kia ora koutou. I’m Zsenai from the National Emergency Management Agency.

I’m actually in our Public Education and Digital Channels team there.

So I’m not an accessibility or digital expert, I’m a communications professional who happens to manage our websites as in a small organisation.

We don’t really have the same dedicated digital expertise that some other organisations might have.

So when I first started in this space, it was kind of a whole other world, a whole other language. I didn’t even know enough to know what I didn’t know.

So what I really wanna focus on today is kinda NEMA’s journey to achieve an accessible website with limited budget, capacity and knowledge really.

So accessibility on a budget.

So back in 2017, NEMA, which was then the Ministry of Civil Defence and Emergency Management, had seven different websites to manage and only one person to manage them because the Ministry was only about 50 people and four of these were for largely the same audience with similar or the same information.

These were our public education website: so Never Happens? Happens, Shake Out, Get Ready to Get Thru and What’s The Plan, Stan?

And we knew that people who didn’t speak English as a first language and disabled people in particular had challenges accessing our information on these. And we knew that generally people had a hard time finding an authoritative source of public education for disasters.

So people were increasingly using mobile devices to access our websites as well. So 41% at the time, which is now over 70%.

Then for our non-public education websites, these were aimed at more civil defence emergency management professionals.

So this is our Takatū learning management system, our civil defence website, which probably you’ll have seen the most of, as it’s the link in those emergency alerts that go out.

And then we had a Google backup site for that as well.

And this audience was primarily browsing at work on desktops. So mobile responsiveness wasn’t a priority.

And we knew that while accessibility was still important for all of the usual reasons that accessibility is important, it wasn’t one of the main challenges for this particular audience.

We couldn’t do kinda everything we wanted to at once. We just really didn’t have the budget or the people.

So we decided to be practical and phase one became about consolidating those four public education websites into one and making it mobile responsive.

So this is our getready.govt.nz.

And accessibility was a really important part of this, but it wasn’t the number one priority to be honest, and we didn’t have the capacity to make any accessibility improvements to those other websites.

So we prioritised the public over civil defence professionals at that point. We had to make some tough decisions based on the resources that we had.

So then moving to 2019, we had a new public education website. It was mobile responsive, it was designed for what our audience wanted and it was mostly accessible.

We’d been involved in a pilot accessibility audit and done a number of automated accessibility checks. But again, probably a lot of you on here know that automated doesn’t quite capture everything.

Also just wanted to about that at NEMA, when we are talking about information accessibility, we are usually referring to a bit broader than what’s often described as digital accessibility.

Pretty much all of our information is classed as high-stakes information because it is about emergency preparedness, response and recovery.

And this means that some of the shoulds that are in the New Zealand Government Web Standards that were mentioned a bit earlier are actually musts for us. We must do some of those things because we have high-stakes information and we must provide our information for those in alternate formats.

Plus for us, one of our other main audiences is actually culturally and linguistically diverse communities. So they also have challenges kind of getting our information and our research has shown that some called "culturally linguistically diverse communities" are often less prepared.

So when NEMA talks about accessibility, we are talking about that actual access and usability of information, including in HTML, alternate formats, plain language and multiple languages.

And so we kind of had this website but we knew we needed to be able to improve information access and usability for everyone.

So this on the slide now is just a screenshot of the homepage of our Get Ready website at the moment, just so you can have a little look at where it’s at now.

But where we were. We were at this point and we knew we needed to like build some capability.

Even if everyone wants to do the right thing, and the intention for accessibility is there, you still can’t make a fully accessible website if the people managing that website don’t have the knowledge. That’s where we were at, at that point.

We wanted to make sure this website met the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines to level AA as they are. But kind of ironically, these guidelines are not actually that easy to understand and apply if you don’t already know what you need to know.

So we needed to be able to meet requirements with limited in-house understanding what that involved and we didn’t really have the budget to go outside of the organisation in any kind of meaningful way.

I think a lot of us on here know those arguments around thinking about accessibility before a project starts.

And Paula mentioned about it being kind of an economic benefit and it is more cost-effective, but that only really works if everyone understands accessibility and like going forward into the future.

So once you’ve got it, how do you maintain it? Which meant for us, there were two main things that we did.

So NEMA invested in giving me in the first place the training and education so that I could then lead this work at NEMA in house.

And this was both more cost-effective for us than hiring outside help at a small agency. But then you also are upskilling staff who can train and inform other staff to be able to do some of this basic work in house.

Secondly, we did use some of that limited budget we had to hire an external auditor to audit the accessibility of our website.

So not to fix things but to help us understand, us and our developers understand what the issues were and how we did need to fix them.

So with kind of this extra knowledge, we could do a lot of the work ourselves at NEMA with our web developers and now we’re able to apply our accessibility knowledge with and without automated checker as well to start improving the accessibility of some of our other websites, those ones for the civil defence emergency management professionals.

There is still quite a long way to go in that space, but we can now.

But I did also want to talk a bit about best practice.

So best practice in our situation would be to make sure that we achieved the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and had alternate formats and our other languages ready to go when we launched the website.

Best practice isn’t always practical though. If we had waited to do that, we would be waiting years.

It took us five years from when we first looked at those seven websites until we had a mostly compliant website with alternate formats and multiple languages, and that was done over time.

So there were a few things we had to make some really practical decisions on.

We didn’t do user testing because we just couldn’t afford to. Instead we get more ad hoc feedback, make changes as needed.

User testing is something we want to do in the future, but it just hasn’t been able to come to that forefront because we’re having to make some of these kind of tough decisions on what we can actually do.

And we made incremental changes to our accessibility as we could, and this is still happening.

I say a mostly accessible website because, for example, a couple of our videos still don’t have captions. Like we are constantly working to get to that point.

And we decided to release our alternate format versions as soon as we could. So not wait for all of them at once.

We found we couldn’t afford to do them all at the same time. So we prioritised.

Since we had made accessible HTML, large print and Braille came a bit later because we had at least some measure of equivalent there with the HTML.

So we did Easy Read, New Zealand Sign Language, and then audio large print and Braille.

The more important thing for us being that we make the information available to people as soon as we had it.

We didn’t wanna be sitting on any of this and waiting until we could do kind of that best practice piece.

And we find that, you know, maintaining accessibility takes just as much work as getting there.

So achieving accessibility is not the end. The ongoing challenge is making sure that everyone working on the website has the knowledge to keep it accessible.

We keep track of any new content or updates that go onto the website to make sure that they are accessible and that the alternate formats and other languages match the English content, that’s actually one of our big ones, to then track and keep on top of.

And we try and make efficiencies in other parts of our work so that we can put enough time into accessibility and make it easier.

So we, for example, we kinda automate other things when we can so that it frees up a little bit more of our time.

We’ve also run into issues. Kind of the ready-made modules for our content management system don’t let us do what we need them to do.

The module we were using for our other languages didn’t let those languages meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines like our English version did. So we had to look at a custom option instead.

And that all kind of takes us to now.

We have an accessible website and we understand the work does not stop there.

As a comms person coming in, not having worked in accessibility or even really websites to a meaningful level before, accessibility can be confusing and it can be difficult.

I would say now that I am an advocate, I have more knowledge about accessibility than a lot of other comms professionals, but not nearly enough.

And there will be plenty of other organisations like mine that don’t have the in-house knowledge or the financial resource to make a meaningful change in their organization’s digital accessibility, even if they want to.

So training and resources are really fundamental. Currently learning about accessibility requires knowing where to look and it’s geared towards people with already kind of a base level of knowledge. But I think there also needs to be enough training resources for others as well.

Even if all you’re doing is uploading content in your role, using kind of set templates, either those templates need to be accessible or you need to understand what’s important and why.

So I’m kind of finishing on a bit of a plea to everyone who does work more full-time in this space than me. Help people and organisations be able to improve their digital accessibility. Make it easy for them to understand resources. Compile them in one place and just spread the word about it.

So kia ora, thank you.

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Grant Carpenter: Thank you, Zsenai. That’s brilliant.

And I know that you’re gonna stay round because you’re gonna be part of our panel and I can see questions rolling in, so if people are thinking they want to ask Zsenai something in particular, put that into the chat or, sorry, into the Q&A and we’ll follow up on that.

Now I have just been handed a little note that says, some of you may not be able to see the interpreters, the sign interpreters.

If you need to, you can actually pin their presentations. So if you go up to More and down to Accessibility and then toggle Priorities, you should be able to pin our interpreters for us.

Thank you.

I’m gonna hand over now to some folk from the Ministry of Social Development.

We have Peter and Di. Peter is one of the UI/UX designers working in MSD on web design and Di is a senior digital accessibility specialist within MSD.

They’re gonna talk us through some of the things that happens in the mini, sorry, MSD, the Ministry of Social Development, some of the things that happen in the Ministry of Social Development to improve web accessibility.

Peter, if I can hand over to you.

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Peter Koenders: Thank you, Grant.

Kia ora and good morning.

I’ll just share my screen and I’ll get started.

Oh, can you see my screen?

Thank you. Yeah, good morning.

My name is Peter Koenders and I’m a UI/UX designer in the Ministry of Social Development’s Web team.

Our Web team manages about 33 websites and applications across multiple platforms and we collaborate with the Digital Accessibility team at MSD to deliver inclusive solutions.

Today I will outline our user interface or UI design system and how we include accessibility.

A UI design system is a collection of reusable UI components and style guidelines to create consistent and efficient UI outputs. It’s a blueprint for designing interfaces, ensuring a unified look and feel across templates and platforms.

Our design system includes what we call design tokens, and these are values for colour and spacing, including numbers, strings, and booleans. And these are the foundational elements to build typography libraries, component libraries like buttons, or cards, or accordions, et cetera.

And template libraries like home pages, or landing, or general content pages.

Design systems also output presentation code or cascading style sheet values for developers to kind of kickstart them.

Design systems and accessibility do go hand-in-hand ensuring design assets are aligned with requirements and standards at the outset so organisations can prevent issues later.

Design systems also include accessibility audits and business requirements, meeting compliance and standards and documentation and guidelines, which kind of leads to a enhanced user experience overall.

Design systems provide native and third-party colour tools to help meet accessible and brand colour requirements.

Sorry, I’ve just noticed this is on the screen. And this slide shows a snapshot of a typical colour library in our design system in a regular colour mode.

And this slide shows the same colour library in a high contrast mode.

We can also test for different types of colour blindness.

Type faces are the foundation for an accessible visual reading experience and choosing a performance typeface that enhances legibility and readability for people with poor vision and learning disabilities is central for making our written information as accessible as possible.

This slide shows a snapshot of different heading levels as they appear in our design system.

And to make typography genuinely accessible, we also look at other best practices to ensure the typeface is readable and scalable.

And we rate our typography on the following features to give the typeface an overall kind of accessibility score when we are choosing typefaces.

Imposter letters is something that we look at, and these are letters that look like other letters like the capital I and the lowercase I and the number one. They should be looking different.

Mirroring, and that is distinguishing between similar letters like the d and the b or q and a p which helps people who experience letters moving or flipping while reading.

Discernability, and those are letters that are too close together that can start to look like other letters, especially when the font size is small.

Ligatures, these are joined letters that can be an accessibility issue because they can create unfamiliar characters.

And finally, the cap height and ascenders.

The tall parts of letters such as stems in a lowercase i and the I should be taller than the height of a capital letter to emphasise word patterns and make letters more legible.

Components are reusable design elements like buttons and cards with varying options.

Components can be prototype and they help maintain consistency and save time by allowing updates to be made to our master component across all instances.

This slide on the screen now just shows a collection of some components in our design system.

Accessibility specialists, testers, and designers can communicate and connect key details directly to designs with annotation tools.

And we can highlight important properties and help developers quickly visualise any specifications and requirements.

So colour, you know, the foundational elements and typography and components, they’re the building blocks for templates. They are reusable library items and they include common interactions, patterns and annotations.

On this screen, on this slide, there is a wire frame of a homepage in a mobile view and we can also present that same page in a tablet view and in a desktop view.

When brand, colour, and typography libraries are applied to templates, it’s easy to get the design sign-off from our business.

We provide a functional prototype with responsive views and the business can, you know, understand and get a feel for what the final product will look like.

We test for high contrast, and sign-off of our design files will include an accessibility report.

So the outputs of our design system include colour, typography, component, and template libraries, presentation code for our developers and accessibility report and project documentation.

We can also see like some system metrics from our tool.

So over 30 days during April, Team #1 at MSD inserted over 350 components from a single library into design projects. And that is a potential 350 times that a design element did not need to be recreated or even tested for accessibility.

General metrics, you know, there’s gains around 50% quicker time to market, more efficient design and better output quality and enhanced user experience.

And there’s savings of around 30% lower project costs, fewer developer and designer efforts and less code maintenance with those reusable libraries.

Building accessibility into a design system from day one means that design systems drive accessibility efforts to ensure that products and services are inclusive and meet requirements.

Design systems are efficient and the output is consistent. They are scalable, which makes it easier for us to work on larger projects. They include prototyping tools and the business gets a preview of the final product and what it would feel like.

We do save a little bit of time, which kind of allows us to improve user experiences.

They are collaborative and flexible and finally, they are a source of truth.

Thank you.

I’ll now hand you over to Di Drayton from the Digital Accessibility team.

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Di Drayton: Kia ora, just to check, can everyone see my screen or...

I’ll share it again. Sorry.

Grant Carpenter: Hello, Di. We can see the last slide of Peter’s.

Di Drayton: Oh, cool. Oh, that’s brilliant.

Sorry, that’s the one I was sharing.

Sorry. Thanks, Pete. That was a great explanation of the design system.

And kia ora. My name’s Diane Drayton. I’m a senior digital accessibility specialist in the MSD Digital Accessibility team.

And today I’m going to add to what Peter said about the value of the design system and driving accessibility. And I’ll briefly touch on ways to measure its effect.

So the design system is good for everyone and for many reasons, but I’m just gonna highlight two for now.

So websites are consistent and I mean, that means we all know what to expect, whether that’s the client navigating the site and knowing where to find the information they need or it’s us working on the site, it’s familiar content.

And also it helps us with accessibility knowledge sharing.

So we meet regularly with the Web team and other technical teams and as you can probably imagine, it’s a lot easier for someone to learn about accessibility when they’re looking at something that’s consistent rather than looking at different websites every time.

So it’s a really powerful tool for us. As a government department, we don’t have the same economic drivers that Paula mentioned earlier. So we don’t have competitors, we don’t have customer acquisition.

We do have feedback, but I question how good that feedback is or how useful that feedback is. If something’s not accessible, are we really hearing from everybody? And so can we rely on that feedback as much as we would like to be able to rely on feedback?

But what we can measure is against the Digital Accessibility Maturity Model or the DAMM, D-A-M-M.

So the DAMM comes in five levels, beginning at level one, which is initial.

So if accessibility is considered, it’s ad hoc.

In level two, there’s some accessibility processes that are repeatable but they’re not rolled out across the organisation.

Level three accessibility processes are defined, knowledge is growing.

Level four, accessibility is managed and measured, and level five is optimised and there’s innovation and we’re doing things better.

So we can take our websites that were built without a design system and we can say that they’re at level one of the DAMM. The accessibility, if it was considered, it was ad hoc, it wasn’t repeatable.

And websites built with the design system are at level two of the DAMM.

So now we have something to compare.

So we can audit our websites at level one and we can compare them with audits of our websites at level two.

And we can look at things like the estimated remediation costs. So for us, we found in our early numbers, we saw a 78% reduction in the estimated remediation costs.

We can look at complexity to fix. So where are those issues?

For us, we found that those issues were mostly content, so not very complex to fix.

And then we can look at the impact of the issues. And for us, we found that our issues were mostly in the best practice in the level AAA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

So they have an impact, but the impact is lower than if they’re at level A or AA of the Web Accessibility Guidelines.

And a manual audit is the gold standard, but if you can’t do a manual audit, DIA have got the CWAC, which Paul mentioned earlier, the Central Web Accessibility Checker. So that is a tool you can use to audit your websites.

Yeah, so from Pete and I, just like to say thanks everyone.

It’s been a great opportunity to present and back to Grant.

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Grant Carpenter: Thank you so much and thank you, Peter.

We know you are also gonna join us for questions and I think we’ve already got some around typeface and things coming in for Peter.

So we’ll hold those till the second half.

Look, I’m gonna hand over now to Sacha.

Sacha Green is from the Citizens Advice Bureau, a slightly different view of government accessibility and how it works, perhaps a little bit more from the outside, which is really important because that feedback’s critical for us to understand how to do things better as well.

So Sacha, if I could hand over to you.

---

Sacha Green: Thank you, kia ora koutou.

Ko Sacha Green toku ingoa.

Following Paula’s lead, I’m wearing a black and white top and black cardigan. I’ve got wavy brownish hair and my background is the beautiful teal blue colour of GDAF and the letters GDAF are above my head.

My sign name is this and it’s two hands, my two hands pressed together, palm to palm with a wave motion of my fingers going upwards.

So kia ora.

I will just share my screen, hopefully.

I’m hoping that’s working.

Yes.

So I am the National Advisor Legal and Strategic at Citizens Advice Bureau New Zealand.

I’m not a digital accessibility expert or a web designer or anything else like that, but I do have on-the-ground experience of what it’s like for people out there interacting with public services and trying to participate in society.

Just a little bit about Citizens Advice Bureau to start. The whakatoki that is the basis for our te reo Māori name is Tāku pou whakawhirinaki i ngā wā o te porotaitaka.

And that’s my source of strength in moments of adversity and that’s what we seek to be as Citizens Advice Bureau, a place where people can come with whatever issue they have and find support.

We provide a free independent information and advice service.

We are volunteer led, so our services around the motu are provided by over 2,000 volunteers at 80 sites.

And we are for anyone, everyone I should say, and about everything. And that’s probably a starting point for our commitment to accessibility.

I think our universality as a service means that there is no wrong door, no wrong issue for anyone who comes to us. So everyone is able to come with whatever issue that they have.

And last year, we helped over 330,000 people across the issues that people face.

And those are often issues that will interact with the work you are doing in your different agencies.

We work on an empowerment model, so we are aiming to provide people with options and pathways so that they can find a way forward.

My involvement in this area really started just over five years ago when we started noticing the impact of digitization of government and other services on our clients. And we felt we needed to give some focus to that.

So we did some research looking at our client inquiries and in a three-month period, we had over 4,000 clients who were identified as being digitally excluded. So we put together a report looking at these issues.

And that has meant that we’ve continued in this area of work since then because we’ve, you know, we’ve noticed some issues that are not going away and that need attention.

For us, digital exclusion is about situations where people face barriers participating fully and because of information and services being online.

What we found is that digital exclusion is experienced across demographics.

Paula talked a little bit about the stats in relation to disabled people and disabled people were certainly amongst those who we could see overrepresented in those who were digitally excluded, who were coming to us.

But that it was also across age groups, which I think was a surprise for some people when we shared our research, that it’s not just an issue for older people.

And I think that that is because when we look at digital exclusion, there are a whole range of factors that are contributing there.

And it’s not necessarily just about access to a device or digital literacy. It was about issues of poverty, literacy in a general sense, people’s ability to read, it was about language barriers disability and it was also about choice and that sometimes people didn’t want to have to engage online.

What we were seeing was that the prioritisation of digital services and the scaling back of non-digital options meant people were facing barriers to information and services and that that was exacerbating existing inequities and negatively impacting on people’s manner, their independence and their well-being.

So we kind of got kicked off into a campaign that was about leaving no one behind.

Our work in that area included a petition to parliament. The Petitions Committee took that on board and there was a special debate in parliament. And during that debate we heard members of parliament across the political spectrum acknowledging this issue and identifying that there needed to be a solution.

Thank you for sharing our campaign page there.

So with that work, we have been raising the issues of concern around not just digital inclusion, but what we identified as a issue of social inclusion.

And one of the recommendations that came out of our work was the idea that government services need to be designed in a way that is multi-channel.

So that’s not just about digital accessibility, it’s thinking about the interconnection between digital services and other avenues for people, whether it’s phone or face-to-face or paper-based.

And we were successful in getting a commitment added to the open Government Partnership National Action Plan to establish an inclusive multi-channel approach to the delivery of government information and services.

So that was a government commitment.

Unfortunately, we have seen very little action on that, and it’s dropped off the radar with a lack of resourcing and shift in government priorities.

And we’re aware as an organisation that there is a strong pull within government towards digital first. Alongside that, we sometimes experience the threat of digital only and that’s where we really see people being shut out.

So that commitment I would really like to see being held to.

But alongside that, I think there are other things that we can look at, for encouraging an approach that is about designing services with people’s needs at the centre.

The Digital Services Design Standard, I was very pleased to see, has guidance in there around using digital technologies to enhance service delivery.

So it’s about technology as an enabler for well-designed services. And it’s also about considering how technology can support offline channels, recognising that not everyone is going to be able or willing to use digital services.

Our experience in CAB I guess is that the barriers of access to a device, a stable internet connection and confidence to use digital technology, those are significant.

But we’re often dealing with people who are managing multiple challenges, whether that is about disability, whether that’s about the specifics of the issue that they’re dealing with, and the stress factors involved in that.

And so often what people are needing is someone alongside them to help them navigate the information, navigate their rights, and feel empowered about those next steps.

So it’s kind of there’s the aspect of going, yes, the information is in a format that might be accessible, but we are talking about government services, which sometimes are a, you know, are about people’s rights and entitlements.

They’re about sometimes people’s responsibilities and ones, if they don’t meet, that they may face some penalty.

So consistently our experience is that people are looking for support alongside digital technologies.

The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities also supports that approach around disabled people being able to seek, receive, and share information in forms they can understand and use through forms of communication of their choice.

So absolutely we want to see public services provided with information available in alternate formats such as Easy Read, large print, New Zealand Sign Language and Braille, but also to ensure that offline, in-person, human services are integral to the proactive design of public services.

Now I know it might feel like I’m just speaking out of the experience of a service that does operate in this in-person way and maybe I don’t have the experience in terms of the digital design, but we have just recently been involved in a project where we have built a website from the ground up.

The CAB was asked to take on a project of designing a website for people who are looking for records from times when they have experienced government or other agency’s involvement in their guardianship or care.

So we created a website. We took it on on the basis that alongside digital accessibility, we knew we had an in-person service alongside that, to support people to navigate those rights.

So we’ve got on our website information available in accessible formats. We’ve got an Easy Read toggle. We’ve met WCAG and New Zealand Government Web Standards, done accessibility testing and auditing.

And we continued to make improvements, but as I say, that was on the basis that we also knew that we could offer that practical support alongside.

Just a final slide is just acknowledging from our experience, we absolutely acknowledge the benefits of digital technologies, the importance of digital accessibility and the ways in which that can empower people, provide people with greater independence and allow for participation in society.

But our view is that it, you know, we have to look beyond that, and see it as a tool and not an end goal. So our encouragement from CAB is to shift the focus from digital inclusion to social inclusion, to look at a multi-channel approach.

And one of the things we’re really aware of as a gap is that currently there is a Digital Service Design Standard, but there’s not a public service design standard.

And it would be really great to be able to see a step back and look at how digital and non-digital are integrated and so that people can access many of their fundamental rights, they can meet their obligations and get the information and services that they need.

So yes, and I’ve got lots of practical suggestions of that, but we can save that for the panel discussion if relevant. So that’s my encouragement to you.

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Grant Carpenter: Sacha, thank you so much.

I’ve got some questions of my own actually, and there’s a whole lot flooding through about some of those practical examples, so I’m quite looking forward to some of that in the panel discussion.

And I think there’s some of the questions coming through, even from your fellow panellists, so it could be, yeah, very interesting discussion, I think.

Look, what we’re gonna do now is take a five-minute break.

So that gives everyone a chance to do what you need to on your space and then we’ll come back and we’ll sit down with the panel.

We have some questions coming through.

If you’ve got others that you’d like to ask, remember we have Sacha who work with Citizens Advice Bureau.

We have Zsenai with her work with NEMA and Peter and Di working away in the Ministry for Social Development.

So you may think of things that you want to ask all of them.

We’ve certainly got some questions, but I’ll give you five minutes to think about those questions and to do the other things you need to do and we’ll see you back soon. Ka kite.

[5-minute break]

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[Question-and-answer (Q&A) session]

Grant Carpenter: I hope you were able to do all the things you needed in that five minutes. It isn’t long, five minutes.

There’s been lots of racing around over here as we just try to organise some questions and things. So what I’m gonna do now is I’m gonna ask the panellists to turn on their cameras please so that we can see you all, and I’ve got some questions and I’m sure you have questions of each other as well.

So feel free to reach out and continue the conversation. Don’t be restricted by what we’ve got here.

I know we’re not gonna get to all of the questions, sadly, but I think Jason Kiss is gonna drop in at the end of the session and we’ll just talk a little bit to how we might still be able to meet your needs and get you the information you need.

The other thing is, it’s not too late to add a question. If you would like to, please put it into the Q&A and we will pick them up as we go.

I’m gonna open with the first question that came in and it’s kind of a, I’m hoping, Peter, not too difficult one, but it seemed like a good starter and it was around typefaces.

"How do you find out how accessible a certain typeface is?"

Peter Koenders: Yeah, sorry. Good question.

Yeah, when we look at a typeface, there are certain kind of features that we look at, at the typeface, which I briefly covered.

And they were like imposter letters, imposter letters. And they’re like letters like the capital I and the I and the number one. Often in typefaces you see that they look exactly the same. And just having those distinguished letters, you know, that they are looking different.

And also we’ve seen often in typefaces, ligatures like the F and the H or the F and the L, they can often be joined and yeah, we also look for a typeface where they’re not joined.

Yeah, that’s the kind of things, the features that we’re looking at.

There’s a whole lot more other things around variable fonts where we can, if we wanted to, we can adjust the typeface a little bit and make certain features taller or shorter.

And we also consider the spacing as well, like the letter spacing and yeah, we don’t want letters that are too close together to form other letters when that font is small.

Did that answer the question?

Grant Carpenter: I think that gives people a good start.

Peter Koenders: Yeah.

Grant Carpenter: And I think also that the Web Accessibility team on this side are looking and thinking, well, then maybe there’s a little bit of guidance that we can ship out to people too and some things that we can help people with.

So thank you for the person that gave us that question and thank you for your answer, Peter.

Zsenai, I wonder whether I might come across to you.

"You described your journey of learning and how you became engaged with the process of accessibility and the things you needed to do.

I was wondering whether you could tell us some of the places that you were able to go to, that were able to help you on that journey and some of the information you could draw down on."

Zsenai Logan: Yeah, I mean, so I’ve actually seen Gillian in the chat. So I did the micro credential on Intro to Digital Accessibility, which kind of like, after I’d gone, this is something we need to do, that was the first step, and that really opened the doors on what could be out there.

But in general, it was a lot of hunting down of different resource pieces.

Digital.govt has a lot of awesome stuff, so shout out to the Web Standards team, but there’s also a lot of really cool work out of Australia. That’s one I really kinda go to quite a bit.

There’s a couple of newsletters that I get regularly that just have updates on interesting work happening out of there.

There’s also an online course outta South Australia that I ended up doing as well.

So I think not just looking in New Zealand, but what’s happening over there or in other places as well is definitely worthwhile, yeah.

Grant Carpenter: Lovely.

We might come back to you and see if you can supply some URLs and connections —

Zsenai Logan: Yes.

Grant Carpenter: — to some of those resources and see how we can get those out to people.

I wonder what the rest of the panel, in terms of your interactions and learning more about how to make things accessible, are there places that you’ve gone that have been really useful and valuable in providing the information you need?

Di Drayton: Kia ora.

It’s Diane here.

One of the places I found really useful was the DIA’s community of practice for digital accessibility.

So going along to that, you not only learn a lot, but you can connect with other people. So that’s probably one of my top places to go and it’s on...I’m sure Jason and Katherine will provide links.

Grant Carpenter: Thanks Di and a good prompt to them.

I can see them racing to put something together there.

Sacha Green: Grant, from our experience, absolutely all the resources that are available through digital.govt.nz.

There’s lots of amazing information there and guidance, but I think just acknowledging what Paul has said too, and our experience in creating the Kōnae My Records Guide website was just that importance of speaking with of, you know, engaging with people who the end product is for.

And so I think, you know, that’s a critical aspect in the design phase, but also in terms of that openness to feedback and to continuing to improve and make things more accessible.

Grant Carpenter: Thanks, Sacha.

It is very much that construct of nothing about without, and it’s so obvious sometimes-

Sacha Green: Yeah.

Grant Carpenter: but we do sometimes forget it.

Lovely, thank you.

I know that there’s lots of questions around where to go and how to start the journey or just even how to improve along the journey.

So I think that information is quite valuable to people and it’s good to have a pool of people that can sort of promote some of the places to go, so thank you.

Now, this is a kind of a general question, perhaps a little bit to you as well, Peter, was just this idea of "when you are working to make some of your digital services more accessible, do you find that when you put some features in to enable accessibility for some groups that by default you may cause issues for other groups?

And how do you manage that?"

I’ll just get you to mic. Thanks Peter.

Peter Koenders: Yes. Sorry.

We haven’t had kind of feedback that we are not missing out on other groups.

Sometimes we do get the feedback that our designs or our prototypes, they’re not

what I would call the best user experience, I guess, around, you know, design or visual design.

But I’d just like to think, you know, at the core of what I do and what our teams do, you know, we’d like to think that, you know, user accessibility is at the base of the best user experience.

It’s something to build on from there.

So yeah, we do get that feedback now and then that certain kind of templates, you know, something’s not, you know, aligned correctly what’s on the right-hand side as opposed to the left-hand side of the page.

But yeah, you know, using, yeah, yeah I think digital accessibility at the core is the baseline for that user experience, sorry.

Grant Carpenter: No, thanks. Thanks, Peter.

Is that a issue that any of the rest of the panellists have seen in their work where they’ve been working very hard to maybe create accessibility in one group and then realised by default they’ve accidentally made a little bit harder for another?

Di Drayton and Zsenai Logan: Um.

Zsenai Logan: You go first, Di.

Di Drayton: Okay. Thanks, Zsenai.

Yeah, it’s Diane here.

We do, not so much with the websites, but I have had times where, I won’t name the product, but you’ll have a product where you have to make a decision.

It’s not gonna be as pretty or quite as easy for this group, but for this other group, so this was for the screen reader group, it wasn’t gonna be accessible.

So sometimes it’s when you’ve bought an off-the-shelf product and you’re trying to run that, you know, squeeze that in to make it accessible, you end up having to say,

"I’ve gotta make sure that everybody can actually access it even though I know that some people aren’t going to have an ideal experience."

Zsenai Logan: Zsenai here.

I think for us, one of the things that I’ve really noticed is around that video space and trying to balance some of the New Zealand Sign Language with, say the needs of people with hearing impairments within the different languages, and like trying to account for all of those and maybe one advertising campaign video.

It’s just not going to work in that way. So what we ended up doing with that, which I quite enjoy, is if you go on our website, our videos have a little tabs across. On the same video, you can tab to the different versions of that video.

So it’s not necessarily that we’re trying to fit all of the needs into one place, but we’re trying to think about how we can still have that same experience for each person.

Grant Carpenter: Thanks, Zsenai.

It sounds like you’ve got some way of sort of dividing up so that people can kind of progress to the place that best meets their needs.

Zsenai Logan: Yeah.

Grant Carpenter: Very good. Thank you.

Hey, listen, the next one, and it is for you, Sacha, and you kinda opened up the opportunity to do this, is this discussion around different channels and my role in government is to assist with the integration of services.

So that’s the integration of digital services, but we talk about digital as an enabler, so it doesn’t have to be the front end of the process that’s actually delivering for you.

So I’d be really keen to hear a little bit about "some of the ways that you’ve been able to make those channels work together and some of the things you might suggest to the system to make it even better."

Sacha Green: Thanks for that question.

I mean, Citizens Advice Bureau is inherently a multi-channel service and we have, you know, we prioritise having that frontline presence in communities where people can come physically to our Bureau if that’s the way that they need to interact, as well as over the phone and interacting with us digitally through our live chat function that we have that’s staffed by volunteers and as well as, you know, messaging function, email and things.

So we kind of, we’re working across all those channels, doing our best to use digital as an enabler, both in terms of our service delivery but also our service design.

I think in terms of government agencies, I mean, I can see that it’s a really challenging environment because there is a strong push towards digital first, but consistently, I hear, thankfully, the acknowledgement that digital does not meet everyone’s needs all the time.

And I think in fact any of us can have situations where we need the non-digital option.

We need someone on the other end of the phone. I’m sure, you know, many of us here will have experienced the frustration of being on the other end of a phone with a extremely long wait time ahead of us.

So from a practical point of view, some of the things I would suggest are things like thinking about how people can move between channels.

So if you’ve got great web accessibility, what happens when someone does hit a, you know, comes up against a barrier blockage? Is there an option for them to speak to someone, to chat with someone online to get the support they need?

And I think what we would encourage government agencies to do as well is to give visibility, to give, you know, a presence to those alternate channels on your digital platforms. We’ve seen lots of examples unfortunately, of those alternative pathways being hidden or buried.

So, you know, simple things like making, if you’ve got no 800 number, making it visible, being clear about what to expect when you call it, having appropriate capacity to actually respond to those phone calls and not have wait times of an hour or two hours.

But if you know you’re also gonna struggle with those capacity issues, then having an effective callback system and I’m sure technology can be part of the solution for that as well.

If people need a paper form or a guide, give them a link to a printable version or if that is not gonna work for them, have a mechanism where they can interact with someone to get the service in the way that they need.

And I mean, absolutely, we would say people still need that face-to-face service and if you’re not providing it yourself, think about how you partner with community groups to do this.

And we’ve had some really effective engagements with Stats nz around the census or different government agencies wanting to do consultations or engagements where they’ve recognised that we do have a presence and that they can work with us either the distribution of their information or even in terms of having somebody come and be present in the community for sessions where people can come and interact.

Grant Carpenter: Brilliant. Thanks, Sacha.

It’s a complex business, I guess, bringing those different channels.

Is it a challenge that others on the panel have met in different ways?

Zsenai Logan: Zsenai here.

I would say it’s definitely a challenge for us and one we’re not quite figured out just yet.

So we’re definitely further along in that kinda digital space than really figuring out how to distribute a lot of our messaging non-digitally.

I think because of that challenge of we don’t have a face-to-face option in-house, we don’t have a like a real like call centre type thing or anything like that.

There’s not that easy way.

So I think I really appreciate the prod to like kinda partner more with some of those community organisations like yourselves and how we can work better in that space to get some of this out actually.

Sacha Green: And I would use that as well just for another plug for thinking about a public service design standard that steps beyond digital and actually looks at how that service integration can be used to meet people’s needs.

Grant Carpenter: And I guess it is about us striving to achieve some of these things, but we have a ways to go in some spaces, but that’s part of our journey and as long as we’re here with the right commitment is in how we actually activate that.

And I guess it leads a little bit to this question and is for all of you.

"When people are struggling to get access to certain sites or certain material or they’re up against a bit of a barrier in some parts of the organisation, how do they get that messaging to a place in the organisation where it makes a difference?

You know, whether that’s a form that doesn’t work or it’s something else in the system that just doesn’t work for them, how do they get that messaging into your organisation so that they can see a change or they can get help?"

Maybe if I said, Di, would it be okay to start with you on that question?

Di Drayton: Yeah, so MSD do have contact pages where you can contact us.

And also not every website yet, but we are working to get accessibility statements on our website.

So when we do an audit, we’ll create an accessibility statement and in that statement will be a list of issues we know about and how they will affect someone who has a disability. So if you are using a screen reader, these kinda things might not work and there’ll be a contact email on that as well.

So, yeah, it is finding the contact details for MSD, and then contacting them.

And often those emails will end up in our inbox for us to help that part of the organisation fix their issues.

Grant Carpenter: Thanks, Di.

You know-

Peter Koenders: Yeah.

Grant Carpenter: Oh sorry, go Peter.

Peter Koenders: Yeah, also for our team, yeah, we get those tickets coming through where there are issues and then it just goes into a priority list of around when that will be fixed and the resources that we have.

Grant Carpenter: So it sounds like things are being heard and it’s also about how we keep people posted on the fact that we’re doing something.

Zsenai, if I get across to you, what are you doing then?

Zsenai Logan: Yeah, I mean, same thing for us that contact information in the accessibility statement, but I would just kind of say that if you are putting these, which you should, these accessibility statements up on your website, having that contact, that email address, maybe going to the person or the team that can actually make that change.

Otherwise you risk it kind of getting lost in the shuffle and nothing actually happening with it.

So really thinking about where you are sending people. It might not be the same as your general communication contacts.

Grant Carpenter: So you’ve gotta make sure it goes to the right person who can actually enact something to make a difference.

Thank you. Sacha.

Sacha Green: One of the things we do on our CAB website and on the Kōnae website too, is that we actually have the invitation for feedback on every page.

So at the bottom of every page it says, help us make the information on this page more useful. You know, I found it useful, I didn’t, and then comments.

And we find that really effective in terms of pretty much real time, you know, well, feedback that people can provide in the moment in an easy way, which then, you know, we can address.

And of course we’re a small team so things do get to the right person pretty quickly. ’cause we all have to be the right person in our context.

Yeah, and I think again, you know, accessibility in relation to feedback options.

So people being able to, you know, they can call us, they can pop in and see us, they can show us by standing there and, you know, pointing to something on the website to give feedback for improvements or change.

Grant Carpenter: Great, thank you. Look, I’ve got one more question.

There’s a stack of questions we could keep going with, but I think we probably should only hit this one, but I’m gonna throw you a little bit perhaps or you might be ready for it.

Effectively, what we would like to know is,

"what is your elevator pitch or the simplest explanation to try and convince a non-disabled staffer or person that accessibility is an important priority?"

And those people may be in all different levels of your organisation.

Have you got a pitch that each of you might use?

What if I throw it to you first, Zsenai?

Zsenai Logan: It is quite a hard one there.

A lot of the thinking that I do in this is pitched at what our Executive team want to know.

And so I’m often trying to find ways to describe this in terms of the actual risks of not doing it and the costs of not doing it because as like boring and like not as nice as it sounds, that is what they want to know most of the time is what are the actual risks to the organisation, what are the costs if we’re not going to do this?

I think that works quite well at that level.

If you are looking at it a different level as well though, I think you can still use that argument, but it’s also around that accessibility is kind of, it’s beneficial for everyone.

It’s you go onto a website and you can’t find something, you have no idea what you’re looking for, you don’t know how to get there.

That’s still inaccessible as well.

Like I think there are ways that you can try and relate it to people if they don’t have that kind of understanding of what somebody with accessibility needs is actually going through is really trying to get them in somebody else’s shoes.

Grant Carpenter: Thank you, Zsenai.

Sacha, perhaps with you, what’s your pitch?

Sacha Green: I guess we come from a perspective of access to public services being a human right and that the purpose of public services is to serve the public.

So we want everyone to be able to participate in society, have access to their rights, be able to meet their obligations, and that means we need to design and deliver services with people’s needs at the centre.

Disabled people are already facing a range of disadvantages in society when things aren’t being designed and delivered in a way that meets their needs.

So the public service needs to provide leadership and show, you know, show the private sector and others how it should be done so that everyone is included.

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Grant Carpenter: Thank you, Sacha.

Now Di and Peter,

I’m guessing you have to do this at all sorts of different levels inside your organisation.

What about you, Peter, to start with, and then I’ll go to you, Di.

How does that sound?

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Peter Koenders: Yeah, what motivates me, my elevator pitch?

I would say that, yeah, when public services are designed with accessibility in mind, everyone, you know, communities and everyone are included in our products and services.

You know, it’s around being fair that, yeah, everyone should have equal access regardless of ability and also there’s an impact as well.

Accessible design benefits everyone. It improves usability and user experience and resilience as well.

And it’s also maybe that accountability angle as well where governments have a responsibility to serve all of our people or all of our citizens.

And I think it’s something that, or James touched on as well that, yeah, it needs to be for everyone. It’s like a non-negotiable.

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Grant Carpenter: Thank you, Peter. Di.

I imagine you’d have to work on all sorts of levels in your organisation.

Di Drayton: Yeah.

I think there’s been some really good elevator pitches so far and I think at like working at MSD, it’s an old stat now, but 54% of our main beneficiaries either had health condition or a disability and that it was in 2008.

But I mean, we serve some of New Zealand’s most vulnerable people.

But I think also besides the risks and things like that, I sometimes use the elevator pitch that disability is a club that anyone can join.

And as we grow older, we join it as well. There’s an automatic joining period after a certain age. So this is a benefit to all of us and we’re all gonna need accessible websites.

Our brains are all...For all of us, we’ll all slow down and we’ll all find things a bit more difficult to learn and understand.

So that helps everyone, from us to the people we love the most.

Grant Carpenter: Thank you. Di.

What a great reminder that all of us are progressing to a point where we’re gonna need some support with some of this.

Di Drayton: Yeah. We’re hoping on-

Grant Carpenter: Yes, yes. Very good.

Hey look, that’s lovely. Thank you so much for all of you.

Thank you for the input you’ve had and answering the questions.

I can see you are real evangelists for the work and you are making a huge great difference.

So kia kaha to your mahi.

I think that there’s a whole bunch of questions that are gonna come in.

So some of you may get individual requests given that individuals can see where you are working and things like that, so I hope, but if there’s anything we can do to help with that question,

I’m sure we are able to and we’ll be more than happy to.

I’m gonna hand over now back to the web accessibility consultants, inside DIA, just so that they can talk a little bit about some of the services they’re offering and the way things work.

Thanks, Jason.

Jason Kiss: Thanks, Grant.

Right, so the Web Standards team, again, Katherine Barcham and myself, we’re a small team trying to support all of government with the web standards and accessibility.

So we try to provide a few mechanisms of support.

One of these, as has been mentioned earlier, is the Digital Accessibility Community of Practice or DACoP.

This occurs on the last Thursday of every month.

So it’s just once a month.

These actually replace the Web Standards Clinics that we used to run, which were fortnightly, but we’re running the community of practice once a month.

And it’s open like the clinics were, both to public and private sector practitioners.

But the difference between the clinics and the community of practice is that we’re actually holding presentations for the first hour of the community of practice.

We get presentations from the community, different government agencies talking about the work that they’re doing.

And then, much like the clinics, we open it up for a Q&A, and there’s an open discussion of accessibility.

People can raise questions, theoretical or technical about their websites and/or about accessibility.

And we just talk about that and share information about events and the likes.

So that’s something that everyone is welcome to come along to.

For government only, we have the New Zealand Government Digital Community on Viva Engage, what used to be called Yammer.

And this is government only, so it’s just public sector organisations, but it’s the entire public sector, local and central government, Crown entities, universities. Everybody in the public sector who’s a digital practitioner is welcome to join this community.

And we talk about everything related to digital delivery, but accessibility obviously, is a common topic.

If you want to join this community, just email web.standards@dia.govt.nz and we can add you or your whole team. (clears throat)

Thirdly, we have the New Zealand Government Web Accessibility Guide. This is a website. The best way to find it is just to search Google for web accessibility guide NZ and you will see that.

This website includes a whole bunch of guidance around foundational concepts of accessibility, fundamental UI design for accessibility, best practices and techniques for creating discreet, accessible, interactive components and the like.

We don’t write a lot of the guidance, but the primary purpose is to direct users to all of the existing reliable resources that are out there already.

And this is really just one way that we’re helping to build capability across the public sector and the New Zealand web industry.

Just quickly, ’cause these have been mentioned, but I think they’re worth re-mentioning, we’re working to replace the Web Accessibility Standard in early 2027 with a new Digital Accessibility Standard that applies not just to websites but also to non-web documents. So all of your Office documents, PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and native mobile apps.

This will apply to the mandated agencies that the Web Accessibility Standard currently applies to, but also to the seven large Crown entities.

So some of those include ACC, for example, all of Health New Zealand, Kāinga Ora, and a number of other large Crown entities.

We’re also working on more detailed technical mobile accessibility guidance. This will supplement what we published last year and we’re hoping to have this done just by the end of July.

Again, if you wanna help, email web.standards@dia.govt.nz.

And finally, CWAC, it’s been mentioned a couple of times. It’s a really popular tool, open source software that the Government Chief Digital Office has created for scanning websites, for finding automatically detectable accessibility errors.

So it doesn’t measure accessibility, but it gives an indicator of how agencies are tracking on their accessibility efforts.

And from July 2025, we’ll be publishing the results of our regular scans to data.gov nz.

So thanks, and again, any questions about the web standards, you can reach out to Katherine and myself at web.standards@dia.govt.nz.

Back to you, Grant.

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Grant Carpenter: Thank you Jason and thank you Katherine for all your support.

What you haven’t seen is Katherine’s been sitting here handing me question notes and prompting me and reminding me when I forget anything, and I’ve forgotten a few things.

I think it’s what Di’s saying about age.

Look, it’s been great.

Thank you so much to all of you for participating in this session.

We are coming to the end of it now.

I’d just like to thank everyone that’s been involved.

We’ve got Jason and Katherine who had brought this all together and done a huge amount of work.

We’ve got Erika and Tanya who though you don’t see them is sitting in the background and making the whole thing work.

And to our panellists, Zsenai, Sacha, Peter, and Di, thank you so much because you’ve made the session and of course our keynote speakers, Paula and Paul, it has been, as it has been all the time I’ve done this, very informative and I’ve really enjoyed it. And that’s largely because of all of you.

Your participation, your questions, and the energy you give this is critical to us making the whole of government just a little bit more accessible.

Kia ora. Kia kaha.

What I’d like to do now is just close us with a karakia.

Kia whakairia te tapu
Kia wātea ai te ara
Kia turuki whakataha ai
Kia turuki whakataha ai
Haumi e! Hui e! Tāiki e!

Thank you so much. Thank you for all your support.

Thank you for being part of this and thank you for all your work.

Haere ra. Ka kite ano.

You all have a great day.