Does Your Website Need to Be Accessible, and How Do You Check?

Yes. If people can buy from you, book with you or contact you through your website, it needs to work for people with disability too. In Australia the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 applies to online services, and the Australian Human Rights Commission points site owners to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, usually called WCAG, as the practical standard to aim for. Most small businesses never get audited, but complaints do happen, and the fixes are far cheaper to make now than after someone raises one.

What accessibility actually means

Accessibility is not a separate, stripped-back version of your website. It is your normal website, built so that it still works when someone is using it differently to you.

That might be a person using a screen reader, someone who navigates with a keyboard because a mouse is difficult, a customer with low vision who zooms to 200 per cent, someone who is colour blind and cannot tell your red error message from the text around it, or a person who is deaf and needs captions on your video. It also covers plenty of situations that are nothing to do with disability, like reading your site on a phone in bright sunlight, or one-handed while holding a coffee.

The standard most people aim for

WCAG 2.1 at level AA is the benchmark used across Australian government and increasingly by private businesses. It is built on four plain ideas: content should be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. In practice that means people can see or hear your content, they can use it without a mouse, they can follow it without guessing, and it holds up in different browsers and assistive technologies.

Seven checks you can run yourself this afternoon

You do not need special software to find the most common problems. Open your homepage and a key service or product page, then work through these.

• Put the mouse down. Press Tab repeatedly. Can you reach every link, button and form field, and can you always see where you are? If the focus outline disappears, that is a fault.
• Check your colour contrast. Body text needs a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 against its background. Free online contrast checkers will tell you in seconds. Pale grey text on white is the usual offender.
• Read your alt text. Images that carry meaning need a short description. Decorative images should have empty alt text so screen readers skip them, rather than announcing a filename.
• Look at your headings. One H1 per page, then H2 and H3 in a sensible order. Headings are how many people skim a page, so do not use them just to make text bigger.
• Fix vague link text. Screen reader users often jump from link to link. A page full of “click here” and “read more” tells them nothing.
• Check your forms. Every field needs a visible label, not just placeholder text that vanishes when you start typing. Errors should say what went wrong and how to fix it.
• Turn off autoplay and add captions. Video that starts talking on its own is difficult for a lot of people. Captions help everyone, including the many visitors watching with the sound off.

The parts that need a developer

Some things are harder to fix from the WordPress dashboard. Custom dropdown menus, sliders, pop-ups and modal windows all need to be coded so a keyboard can open and close them and a screen reader can announce them properly. Skip links, sensible focus order and correct use of ARIA labels sit in the same bucket.

The theme and plugins you choose matter enormously here. Heavy page builders often produce tangled markup that is difficult to make accessible, which is one of several reasons we prefer clean, purpose-built themes when we take on WordPress web design work. If your site was built years ago on a bargain template, an accessibility review will usually turn up structural issues rather than content ones. Our sister studio Defyn runs into the same thing on rebuild projects.

It is good for business, not just good manners

Around one in five Australians lives with disability, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. That is a large group of customers to make work harder than it needs to be.

There is a search benefit too. Proper headings, meaningful alt text, descriptive links and captioned video are all things that help Google and AI assistants understand your pages. Accessibility and good technical foundations pull in the same direction, which is why we treat them as one job rather than two.

Where to start

Run the seven checks above and fix what you can in your own content, because that is often half the list. Then get someone to look at the template-level issues. If you are tendering for government work or you are a larger organisation, a formal WCAG 2.1 AA audit is worth budgeting for. If you are a small business, a practical review and a tidy-up will get you most of the way.

The cheapest time to do any of this is while a site is being designed. Building it in from the start costs very little. Retrofitting it later costs a great deal more.

Not sure how your site stacks up? Give us a call on 02 9834 4119 or get in touch and we will take a look with you.