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 on its early drafts.

Join the Guidance Review Group

If you’re a digital practitioner who designs, builds, tests or publishes content on web pages, we’d love your feedback on early drafts of the new web accessibility guidance.

If you’d like to be involved, email web.standards@dia.govt.nz and let us know the roles or skillsets you can help with.

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 will be 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:

Items with an asterisk (*) are scheduled to be published in 2021.

Items that have been published are linked to their page on this site.

  • Accordions*
  • 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*
  • Maps
  • Maths (MathML)
  • Media players
  • Menus*
  • PDF and Office documents in the browser*
  • Page loading
  • Page titles*
  • Quotations and citations
  • Search
  • Sidebars / asides
  • Site maps
  • Skip links*
  • Sliders
  • Status messages
  • Switch
  • Tab panels
  • Tables*
  • Tables of contents
  • Text content (languages and meaning)*
  • 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:

Items with an asterisk (*) are scheduled to be published in 2021.

Items that have been published are linked to their page on this site.

Important principles of web accessibility

  • What is web accessibility?*

  • Accessibility benefits
  • Accessibility supported technologies*
  • Accessible names and descriptions*
  • Accessible roles, states and properties*
  • How browsers, code and assistive technologies work together*
  • Inclusive / Universal Design versus accessibility
  • Semantics and markup*
  • User-generated and third-party content
  • WCAG conformance
  • Polices and legal requirements

How disabled people use the web

  • Adaptive strategies used by people with disabilities
  • Alternate formats
  • Assistive technologies
  • Browser accessibility features
  • Operating system accessibility features

Accessible UX best practices

  • Colour and contrast*
  • Dynamic content
  • Hidden content*
  • Keyboard interaction and focus
  • Non-text content*
  • Progressive enhancement
  • Resizable text / page zoom*
  • Responsive design*
  • Social media
  • Touch interfaces
  • Voice assistants and accessibility
  • Web typography

Beyond WCAG

  • Mobile app accessibility
  • Non-web digital documents (PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint)

Delivering accessible web content

  • Accessibility roadmap
  • Accessibility statements
  • Annotating mockups for accessibility
  • Auditing for accessibility
  • Conducting user research and user testing
  • Incorporating accessibility from the start
  • JavaScript frameworks and accessibility
  • Testing web content*
  • Testing with disabled people

Embedding accessibility in your organisation

  • Accessibility in your policies
  • 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 will be delivered in several phases.

The first set of guidance topics is scheduled to be published by 30 November 2021.

The publication dates for the subsequent phases of the guidance are still to be confirmed.

Who the guidance is for

The guidance is being written from the perspectives of 7 core roles that have responsibility for the accessibility of a digital project.

Each of these roles will have its own web page with links to the guidance that’s directly relevant to them.

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

Roles with direct impact

  • user interface (UI) / visual designer
  • developer
  • content designer.

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

  • business stakeholder / senior manager
  • product owner / project manager
  • user researcher
  • quality assurance (QA) tester / analyst.

People in 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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