| Website accessibility means building a site so people with impaired sight, hearing, movement or attention can use it without needing someone else to help. New Zealand law makes it compulsory for government departments and leaves it to commercial judgement for every private company. |
An Invercargill plumbing supplies merchant put a quote request form on its website in 2023.
The form worked when the office manager tested it. She filled in five fields and the enquiry arrived in the sales inbox a second later.
A retired builder who had bought from the firm for thirty years could not use it at all. Arthritis had made a mouse useless to him, so he moved through pages with the Tab key, and Tab would not reach the send button.
He rang the counter instead, as he had for the past eighteen months. So did about five other people a week, and each call ran ten minutes.
Four things were wrong with that page, and each is an ordinary website accessibility fault. The send button could not be reached from the keyboard, the focus outline had been switched off in the theme, three of the five fields had no label, and the grey helper text failed contrast at any size.
The figures below are illustrative. The firm employs 22 people and sells to trade and retail customers across Southland.
Six ten-minute calls a week is an hour a week, or 52 hours a year. At a loaded counter rate of $42 an hour, that comes to $2,184 a year of staff time spent re-taking enquiries the website had already collected.
The firm had also bought a website accessibility overlay at $89 a month after a supplier warned it about compliance. That added $1,068 a year to the bill.
Recurring cost before anybody had looked at the page: $3,252 a year.
The one-off sat apart from that. The web agency billed $900 to install the overlay and to publish a statement saying the site met accessibility standards. The statement was wrong on the day it went live.
Work your own version out from your enquiry log and your counter rates, which takes twenty minutes and needs no specialist.
None of the four was expensive to fix. The developer later quoted a day and a half for the lot.
Does a New Zealand Business Have to Meet Website Accessibility Rules?
No. A private New Zealand company is under no statutory duty to meet a website accessibility standard, and the standard people quote at you was written for government departments.
The confusion comes from a real rule that does not apply to you. The Web Accessibility Standard 1.2 took effect on 17 March 2025 and directs every public service department, the Police, the Defence Force, the Parliamentary Counsel Office and the Security Intelligence Service to meet WCAG 2.2 at level AA on every web page they run.
Councils answer to their own arrangements, covered in our post on council systems and public records. A private business can borrow it as a well-tested website accessibility checklist without owing anybody conformance.
What is the Government Web Accessibility Standard?
The Web Accessibility Standard 1.2 is the Cabinet direction setting the bar for New Zealand public sector websites.
Version 1.2 replaced version 1.1 in March 2025 and points at WCAG 2.2 level AA. It carries a short list of exceptions, and mandated agencies report their conformance to the Government Chief Digital Officer when asked.
The exceptions are worth reading. They list what departments with budgets were allowed to skip.
Could an inaccessible website breach the Human Rights Act?
Possibly, and no New Zealand court has decided the question.
Section 44 of the Human Rights Act 1993 makes it unlawful for anybody supplying goods, facilities or services to the public to refuse them, or to supply them less favourably, on a prohibited ground. Disability is one of the prohibited grounds listed in section 21.
Whether a website counts as the supply of a service has never been tested here. Complaints about discrimination go to the Human Rights Commission and begin with mediation, which takes management time.
Why Does Website Accessibility Matter to a Business?
Because about one New Zealander in six cannot reliably use a site that ignores website accessibility, and the share climbs with the age of your customers. Stats NZ reported in its Household Disability Survey 2023 that 17 percent of people in New Zealand households were disabled, a total of 851,000 people, and that among adults aged 65 and over the rate reached 35 percent.
Read the second figure against your own customer list. A firm selling to retired homeowners is dealing with a larger group than the national average suggests.
Permanent conditions are only part of the website accessibility problem. A cracked phone screen, bright sun on a job site and a broken wrist all produce the same problems for the same page.
Which impairments change how somebody uses a website?
Four groups cover most of it: sight, hearing, movement, and attention or memory.
Low vision means enlarged text, or a screen reader speaking the page in the order the markup sets. Arthritis or a healing wrist means the customer drives your site from the keyboard.
A deaf customer needs captions on your video and a way to make contact without phoning. Someone on medication that affects concentration needs a form that will not time out, and an error message naming the field that went wrong.
What Does WCAG Require for Website Accessibility?
WCAG sets out the testable website accessibility requirements for web content, grouped into three conformance levels.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, shortened to WCAG and said as wuh-cag, come from the World Wide Web Consortium. WCAG 2.2 became a W3C Recommendation on 12 December 2024 and is the version the New Zealand government standard points at.
The requirements are written as things a page must do, each tested on its own. A contract can name a website accessibility level and an auditor can check it.
What do WCAG levels A, AA and AAA mean?
They rank how far a page goes, from the bare minimum to the most demanding.
Level A covers the failures that lock somebody out completely, such as a video with no captions or an image with no alt text. Level AA adds what makes a page workable in daily use, including colour contrast and a visible focus outline. Level AAA is written for specialist content and no New Zealand rule asks a business for it.
Level AA is the working website accessibility target, and almost every contract you meet will name it.
Does WCAG apply to a PDF or an embedded booking system?
Yes. WCAG covers web content of any kind, including the documents you publish and the tools you embed.
A price list published as a scanned PDF is a picture, so assistive software cannot read it and search cannot index it. An embedded booking widget carries its supplier’s accessibility, and your customers will blame your site for it. Open a PDF on your own site and try to select the text.
How Do You Check Website Accessibility on Your Own Site?
Run four website accessibility checks by hand, in about half an hour, before you pay anybody for an audit.
- Keyboard focus, tested with the Tab key
- Colour contrast between text and its background
- A visible label on every form field
- Alt text on every meaningful image
Automated website accessibility scanners find some of the problems and miss the ones needing judgement. WAVE, axe DevTools and Chrome’s built-in Lighthouse audit are free, and none can tell you whether an alt text describes the picture.
How do you test keyboard navigation?
Put the mouse down and press Tab from the top of the page.
The focus outline should move through every link, field and button in a sensible order and stay visible. Press Enter on your main call to action and confirm it fires.
Two faults turn up on most business sites: a focus outline switched off in the stylesheet, and a menu that traps the focus.
What colour contrast does body text need?
Body text needs a ratio of 4.5 to 1 against its background, and large text needs 3 to 1, both set at level AA. Large means 18 point, or 14 point in bold.
Light grey text on white is the commonest failure, and usually a styling choice nobody revisited. Free contrast checkers take two colour values and return the ratio.
Your brand palette may already fail. The fix is normally a darker shade of the same colour.
Which website accessibility checks live in your own content?
Two of the four: alt text on every image, and a label on every form field.
Alt text describes what the image conveys, so a product photo needs the product named and a decorative divider needs an empty alt attribute. An image with none gets announced by its file name.
Form labels are the other half of that check. A placeholder vanishes the moment somebody types, while a label attached to the field stays visible and gets read aloud.
Do Website Accessibility Overlay Widgets Work?
No. A website accessibility overlay is a line of JavaScript that adds a toolbar and adjusts what it can reach from the browser, leaving the faults in the page itself untouched.
Website accessibility overlays are sold on a monthly subscription with a compliance claim attached to the invoice. If your site carries one, somebody signed up for it believing the problem was handled. The product itself is a floating button that enlarges text or shifts contrast.
What can an overlay fix on its own?
An overlay changes presentation and very little beyond it. Most website accessibility faults are outside what a script can reach.
Font size and colour are display settings a script can override. A missing form label, a wrong heading order, an untitled link and a video without captions all live in the page source, where a script running after the page loads cannot reliably reach them.
Every modern browser already carries text sizing and contrast controls, and a customer who needs them set them up years ago.
Why do overlays attract complaints from disabled users?
Because the toolbar gets in the way of the assistive technology the reader has already set up.
A screen reader user arrives with their own shortcuts and speech rate already set. An overlay that injects its own reading mode fights that setup.
Cancel the subscription and spend the money on the page. The overlay in the Invercargill example cost $1,068 a year and repaired nothing.
What Does Semantic Markup Do for a Screen Reader?
Semantic markup tells assistive technology what each part of a page is, so a screen reader can announce a heading as a heading and a button as a button. Get it wrong and the page still looks perfect to you.
A screen reader never sees your layout. It reads elements in source order and lets the user jump between them by type, so a customer hunting for your phone number pulls up the headings list and moves straight there.
Every visual cue on your page has a markup equivalent, and website accessibility depends on you supplying it. Bold red text saying Required is invisible to software, so the customer submits, gets an error and cannot tell which field failed.
What does a correct heading structure look like?
One H1 for the page title, then H2s for each section and H3s beneath them, in order and with no level skipped.
A heading is a structural element, not a font size. A designer who makes a paragraph big and bold produces something that looks like a heading and stays invisible to the headings list.
Check yours in your browser’s reading view. If the sections come out in an order you did not expect, the markup and the design do not match.
What is an ARIA label and when is one needed?
An ARIA label supplies a name to an element that carries no visible text, such as an icon-only button.
ARIA stands for Accessible Rich Internet Applications, a set of attributes added to ordinary HTML. A magnifying glass search button needs one, as does the fourth link on a page reading Read more.
Use it sparingly. Standard HTML elements already carry their meaning, and ARIA layered on top usually makes things worse.
What Does Fixing Website Accessibility Cost a Small Business?
Most website accessibility work costs attention and nothing else, and the paid work on a small business site runs to a day or two of a developer’s time.
| What to check | How to test it | Who fixes it |
|---|---|---|
| Keyboard focus | Tab from the top of the page without touching the mouse | Developer, in the stylesheet or template |
| Colour contrast | Run the text and background colours through a contrast checker | Whoever controls the theme colours |
| Form labels | Click each label and see whether the field takes focus | Developer, or a setting in the form builder |
| Image alt text | Read the alt field on every image in the media library | Whoever edits the site content |
| Heading order | Open the page outline and check no level is skipped | Whoever edits the site content |
| Video captions | Play the video with the sound turned off | Whoever publishes the video |
| Overlay widget | Look for a widget subscription on the monthly invoice | Cancel it and spend the money on the page |
Alt text, heading order, link wording and form labels are website accessibility jobs for whoever already edits the site. Contrast is a stylesheet change. Focus outlines and trapped menus are the only two items on the list that need a developer.
The Invercargill merchant cancelled the overlay and paid a developer $1,800 for a day and a half on the focus outline, the form labels and the text contrast. Counter calls fell from six a week to about one.
Recurring cost went from $3,252 a year to $364 a year, a saving of $2,888 a year.
The one-off is separate and does not net off. The $1,800 fix happens once, and the $900 already spent on the overlay is a sunk cost.
What can you fix this week without a developer?
Alt text on every image, and a real label on every form field.
Open the pages carrying your enquiry forms first, because a failure there costs you an order, then work down your top ten by traffic.
You do not need every page audited before the first fix goes live. Publish the corrections as you make them.
How Do You Build Website Accessibility Into Your Next Site?
Write website accessibility into the brief, test for it at acceptance, and check it yourself before the final invoice is paid.
- Name WCAG 2.2 level AA in the brief as the target, and say who signs it off.
- Ask any agency quoting for the work how they test with a keyboard and a screen reader.
- Add the four manual website accessibility checks to your acceptance list, so sign-off does not rest on the builder’s word.
- Write the content rules down for whoever edits the site: alt text on every image, and link text that describes where it goes.
- Re-test after any theme or plugin update, because a template change can remove a focus outline overnight.
- Record what you fixed and why, so the next person to touch the site leaves it alone.
Website accessibility costs very little during a build and gets expensive as a retrofit. A commissioned application carries the same requirement, and our post on software built to order covers how to specify it.
Who holds the hosting login and who applies the updates is a separate question from what a visitor meets on the page. Our post on your website hosting and the updates behind it covers that layer, and this post covers the page itself.
Charities field this more often than most, because their audiences include the people affected. Our post on technology on a charity budget covers the funding side.
The Invercargill merchant spent $3,252 a year and $900 in fees on a website its own customers could not finish using. A day and a half of work stopped the phone ringing for the wrong reason.
Which of Your Customers Cannot Finish Your Enquiry Form?
Exodesk has supported South Island businesses since 1989 and works with clients across Canterbury, Otago and Southland from offices in Christchurch and Dunedin. Our IT consulting team runs the manual website accessibility checks on your site and hands back a fault list ordered by what each one is costing you.
We tell you which faults are turning customers away and which parts of a standard written for government departments you can leave alone.
Contact us today to discuss how we can help your business or connect with us on LinkedIn to stay updated with more insights.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is website accessibility?
Website accessibility describes how easily a person with a disability can read a site and finish what they came to do. It covers screen reader support, keyboard operation, colour contrast, captions and clear form labels. In practice it means a customer can complete a purchase or an enquiry without asking somebody for help.
Does a private business in New Zealand have to be WCAG compliant?
No. The NZ Government Web Accessibility Standard 1.2 binds public service departments and a handful of named agencies such as the Police, and no New Zealand statute sets a website accessibility standard for a private company.
What is WCAG 2.2?
WCAG 2.2 is the current version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, published by the World Wide Web Consortium and issued as a W3C Recommendation on 12 December 2024. It sets testable success criteria across three conformance levels, A, AA and AAA. The New Zealand government standard requires level AA, and most tenders ask for the same.
Is an accessibility overlay worth the subscription?
Rarely, on a small business site. An accessibility overlay adjusts presentation in the browser and cannot repair a missing form label, a wrong heading order or a video with no captions. Disabled users frequently report that the injected toolbar interferes with software they have already configured. Over two years the subscription usually costs more than fixing the underlying faults once.
How much does it cost to make a website accessible?
On a small business site most website accessibility work is content editing that costs time and no money, and the developer work usually runs to one or two days. Budget for paid help only on trapped menus and on anything needing the stylesheet touched.
What is a screen reader?
A screen reader is software that speaks a web page aloud, or sends it to a braille display, in the order the page markup sets. JAWS and NVDA are common on Windows, VoiceOver comes built into Apple devices and TalkBack into Android. It depends on real headings and real labels, so a well-designed page can be unusable through one.
How do I check my own website using only a keyboard?
Press Tab from the top of the page and watch where the focus outline goes. Each interactive element should take focus in a logical order and the outline should stay visible. Then press Enter on your main button and confirm it submits. If Tab skips a button or gets stuck inside a menu, you have found the first fault worth fixing.
What is an accessibility statement and do we need one?
An accessibility statement is a page saying how accessible your site is, what is known to fall short and how somebody can report a problem or ask for another format. No New Zealand law requires a private business to publish one. It is worth having anyway, because tenders increasingly ask for it and it gives a frustrated customer somewhere to go other than away.
Do accessibility rules apply if we sell to customers overseas?
Possibly, and it depends on the market. The European Accessibility Act sets accessibility requirements for services including e-commerce and banking, enforced through each EU country’s own law, so a New Zealand business selling to European consumers can be caught by it. Take advice on the rules in the markets you sell into, because New Zealand’s silence does not carry over.
Does website accessibility help SEO?
Yes, indirectly. The same markup that lets assistive software navigate a page, meaning real headings and descriptive link text, also tells search engines and AI answer tools what the page covers.
Who is responsible if a web developer built an inaccessible site?
The business that owns the site carries the commercial consequence, whatever the build contract says. A development contract can name WCAG 2.2 level AA as the website accessibility target and set acceptance testing against it, and it is worth settling that before the final payment. Once the site is live and the developer has moved on, every fix becomes the owner’s cost.
Can Exodesk check our website accessibility?
Yes. Exodesk works with businesses across Canterbury, Otago and Southland from offices in Christchurch and Dunedin, and a manual accessibility review is part of the consulting work we do on client websites. We run the keyboard, contrast, labelling and markup checks by hand on the pages that carry your enquiries. You get the faults in priority order, with the cheap content fixes separated from the developer work.
NEXT STEP
Can every customer finish what they came to your site to do?
The keyboard test takes ten minutes, and most business sites fail it somewhere between the menu and the send button. An IT assessment checks what your site does for a customer who cannot use a mouse, alongside the rest of your setup.
Or read more about our IT services.
