Accessibility & WCAG Compliance

The Disability Discrimination Act 1992 makes it unlawful to discriminate in the provision of goods, services and facilities, and that has been applied to websites. The Act does not name a technical standard — WCAG is the yardstick used to demonstrate that you have met the obligation. In practice the requirement usually reaches you through procurement, where a WCAG conformance level is specified in the contract, rather than through a complaint. We are developers rather than lawyers, so treat this as background and take advice on your own obligations.

Level AA is the level virtually every policy and contract specifies; Level A is not enough and AAA is rarely required in full. On version, WCAG 2.2 is the current W3C standard and is backwards compatible, so building to 2.2 AA also satisfies a policy written against 2.0 or 2.1. If your contract names a version, we build to that; if it does not, we build to the current one.

Far more than designing for it would have, which is the honest and slightly unhelpful answer. Remediation cost is driven by how deep the problems go: colour and copy issues are quick, whereas a component library with no keyboard support or a structure that assumes sighted mouse use means rebuilding components rather than adjusting them. An audit tells you which of those you are facing before you commit to a budget.

No, and we would advise against relying on one. Overlays sit on top of the page and cannot fix the underlying markup, so the barriers remain for anyone using assistive technology — while the widget creates an impression of compliance that has not been earned. Accessibility organisations and disabled users have been consistently critical of them. The work has to happen in the build.

Automated testing first, because it is cheap and catches the mechanical problems — contrast, missing labels, heading order. Automated tools only detect a minority of real barriers, so the substantive part is manual: keyboard-only navigation, screen reader testing, focus management, forms and error handling. You get a prioritised list of issues with the effort each requires, so you can sequence the work rather than face it as one number.

Yes, and most remediation work is exactly that. We audit first and tell you honestly whether the existing build can be brought up to standard or whether the component layer is the problem — see project rescue if the site came to you from someone else.

Our head office is in Sydney and we work with clients across Australia — Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide and regional NSW included. Delivery has been remote-first for years, so a project runs the same way whether you are ten minutes away or in another state: scheduled calls, a shared board you can see at any time, and one named point of contact. We are happy to meet in person in Sydney.