About the Web Accessibility Guidance project

Find out about the purpose and scope of the web accessibility guidance, who it’s for and how you can give feedback.

Note: Guidance published on the Web Accessibility Guidance project site is currently awaiting migration to Digital.govt.nz. The guidance is safe to use now, but updates to improve it will continue. If you’re a digital practitioner who designs, builds, tests or publishes content on web pages, we’d love your feedback.

Email web.standards@dia.govt.nz.

Purpose of the guidance

The guidance aims to help build accessibility capability across the public sector and New Zealand web community in order to improve the accessibility of government online information and services.

This means helping practitioners understand what’s involved in producing content that meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 as per the NZ Government Web Accessibility Standard.

It’s useful to anyone delivering digital content in New Zealand, whether they’re in the public or private sector.

What’s in the guidance

There are 2 categories of guidance:

Web content types (A–Z) that practitioners typically build

Note:

This list is subject to change without notice.

Items with an asterisk (*) are next on the list to be published.

See the topics that have been published by following the links below.

  • Accordions
  • Abbreviations
  • Addresses*
  • Alerts
  • Animations and motion
  • Audio
  • Breadcrumbs
  • Buttons
  • CAPTCHA
  • Cards / tiles
  • Carousels / slideshows
  • Data visualisations
  • Dialogs (modal and non-modal)
  • EPUB3
  • Feeds
  • Footnotes
  • Forms and form controls
  • Glossaries
  • Grids
  • Headers and footers
  • Headings
  • Iframes
  • Images
  • Links
  • Lists
  • “Load more” buttons 
  • Maps
  • Maths (MathML)
  • Media players
  • Menus
  • Page loading
  • Page titles
  • PDF and Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint)*
  • Quotations and citations
  • Search
  • Sidebars / asides
  • Site maps
  • Skip links
  • Sliders
  • Status messages
  • Switch
  • Tab panels
  • Tables
  • Tables of contents
  • Text content
  • Tooltips
  • Tree views
  • Videos

For each web content type, the guidance explains:

  • how to make it accessible
  • what good looks like (examples)
  • who benefits from this work
  • which WCAG success criteria this work meets
  • how to test that the work has been done right.

Knowledge areas

Note:

This list is subject to change without notice.

Items with an asterisk (*) are next on the list to be published.

See the topics that have been published by following the links below.

Fundamental concepts in web accessibility

How disabled people use the web

Accessible UX best practices

Delivering accessible web content

Embedding accessibility in your organisation

  • Accessibility in your policies
  • Accessibility in tenders and contracts*
  • Accessibility training
  • Accessible authoring tools and Content Management Systems
  • Commitment and responsibility
  • Monitoring, assurance and accountability
  • Procurement and accessibility

When the guidance will be published

The guidance is being delivered in several phases as batches of related content.

The first set of guidance topics was published in December 2021.

See a list of the most recently added guidance.

Who the guidance is for

The guidance is being written from the perspectives of 7 typical roles or functions that affect the accessibility of a digital product or service.

Each of these roles has its own web page with links to the topics that are directly relevant to it.

There are 2 types of roles: roles with direct impact on the accessibility of web content, and roles with influence.

Roles with direct impact

People in these roles make sure that the user interface, content and web technologies (for example, HTML, CSS and JavaScript) are implemented in ways that work for disabled people and their devices.

Roles with influence

People performing these roles make sure that accessibility work is:

  • supported with expertise, tools and training
  • baked into the product lifecycle
  • validated through user research with people of diverse abilities
  • included as part of quality assurance.

More information

If you have any questions about this project, email web.standards@dia.govt.nz.

Blog posts about this project

Utility links and page information

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