Is your website accessible? A plain-English guide for NZ businesses

What does an accessible website actually mean?

It means someone can complete the thing they came to do without needing perfect eyesight, a steady hand, or a mouse. That's the whole idea. The technical standard behind it is WCAG — the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines — but you don't need to read it to make real progress.

The people affected are more ordinary than the word 'disability' suggests. Someone with a cracked phone screen. A tradie reading your quote form one-handed in a ute. A 68-year-old with cataracts trying to find your phone number. Accessibility work quietly helps all of them.

• Keyboard users can tab through your menu, forms and buttons in a sensible order and always see where they are.
• Screen reader users hear meaningful labels — "Book a consultation", not "button" or "click here".
• Low-vision users get enough contrast between text and background, and text that survives being zoomed to 200 percent.
• Everyone else gets a site that's clearer, faster to scan, and better understood by Google at the same time.

Is web accessibility a legal requirement in New Zealand?

For government agencies, yes — the NZ Government Web Accessibility Standard applies to public service websites and is overseen by the Department of Internal Affairs. For private businesses the position is softer but not empty. The Human Rights Act 1993 prohibits discrimination in the supply of goods and services, and a website is how most services are now supplied.

Nobody is going to knock on your café door over alt text. But if you tender for government or council work, accessibility questions show up in the paperwork, and being unable to answer them costs you the contract. That's the practical risk for most NZ businesses — lost work, not a lawsuit.

Which accessibility problems cost you the most customers?

Most sites fail in the same few places, and they're almost always in the part of the site that makes you money — the booking form, the contact page, the checkout.

Fixing these five things gets you most of the benefit for a small fraction of the effort.

• Form fields with no labels — placeholder text vanishes the moment someone starts typing, and screen readers often skip it entirely. Every field needs a real label.
• Pale grey text on white — the most common fault on modern NZ business sites. Body text needs a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1, and light grey on white rarely gets there.
• Images with no alt text — particularly product photos and any image carrying information, like a menu or price list saved as a picture.
• Menus that only open on hover — fine with a mouse, impossible with a keyboard or a touchscreen. Make them work on click and on focus.
• Video with no captions — worth sorting if video is doing sales work for you, and it helps the large share of people who watch with the sound off.

How do you check your own site without hiring anyone?

Start with your own hands. Load your homepage, put the mouse away, and press Tab repeatedly. If you can't reach the phone number, open the menu, or complete the contact form, neither can a chunk of your customers.

Then run two free tools. Lighthouse is built into Chrome under DevTools and gives an accessibility score with specific failures listed. WAVE, from WebAIM, overlays the errors directly on your page so you can see which element is at fault. Neither catches everything — automated tools find roughly a third of real problems — but they find the cheap wins fast.

• Test on a real phone outdoors in daylight. Contrast problems that look fine on a studio monitor become obvious in the sun.
• Zoom to 200 percent in your browser and check nothing overlaps or gets cut off.
• Check your money pages first — booking, contact, checkout. A perfect About page is worth nothing if the enquiry form is broken.

What does it cost to fix?

Less than most owners expect, if the site is reasonably built. Contrast, labels and alt text are content and CSS changes — usually a few hours of work, not a rebuild. On a well-structured site you're looking at a single small job.

It gets expensive when accessibility is fought against the grain of a site that was never built for it: heavy page-builder templates, decorative-only navigation, text baked into images. In that case the honest answer is to fold accessibility into the next redesign rather than pay twice. We'd rather tell you that than sell you a patch.

The best time to sort accessibility is while a site is being built, when it costs almost nothing extra. The second-best time is now, starting with your booking or contact form. If you'd like a hand working out whether your current site can be improved or is better replaced, our web development team can run through it with you and give you a straight answer.