About the Web Accessibility Guidance Project
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’s 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: This list is subject to change without notice.
See the topics that have been published by following the links below.
- Abbreviations
- Addresses
- Alerts
- Animations and motion
- Audio
- Breadcrumbs
- Buttons
- CAPTCHA
- Cards
- Carousels (slideshows)
- Data visualisations
- Dialogs (modal and non-modal)
- Disclosures and accordions (show/hide)a
- EPUB3
- Feeds
- Footnotes
- Forms and form controls
- Glossaries
- Grids
- Headers and footers
- Headings
- Iframes
- Images
- Links
- Lists
- “Load more” buttons
- Maps
- Maths (MathML)
- Media players
- Menus
- Page loading
- Page titles
- PDF and office documents
- Quotations and citations
- Search
- Sidebars / asides
- Site maps
- Skip links
- Sliders
- Status messages
- Switch
- Tab panels
- Tables
- Tables of contents
- Text content
- 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: This list is subject to change without notice.
See the topics that have been published by following the links below.
Fundamental concepts in web accessibility
- Accessibility supported technologies
- Accessible names and descriptions
- Browsers, code and assistive technologies
- Inclusive / Universal Design versus accessibility
- Roles, states and properties
- Semantics and markup
- User-generated and third-party content
- WCAG conformance
How disabled people use the web
Accessible UX best practices
- Basic HTML
- Colour and contrast
- Designing documents for print
- Dynamic content
- Hidden content
- Keyboard accessibility
- Language of content
- Mobile app accessibility
- Non-text content
- Progressive enhancement
- Resizable text / page zoom
- Responsive design
- Social media
- Touch interfaces
- Voice assistants and accessibility
- Web typography
Delivering accessible web content
- Accessibility statements
- Annotating mockups for accessibility
- Auditing for accessibility
- Conducting user research and user testing
- Incorporating accessibility from the start
- JavaScript frameworks and accessibility
- Procuring a web accessibility audit
- Testing web content
- Testing with disabled people
Embedding accessibility in your organisation
- Accessibility in your policies
- Accessibility roadmap
- Accessibility training
- Accessible authoring tools and content management systems
- Commitment and responsibility
- Monitoring, assurance and accountability
- Accessibility in web procurement
- Legal and policy requirements
When the guidance will be published
The first set of guidance topics was published in December 2021.
Newly developed guidance and updates to existing guidance are being regularly published.
See a list of the most recently added guidance.
Who the guidance is for
The guidance is being written from the perspectives of 7 typical roles or functions that affect the accessibility of a digital product or service.
Each of these roles has its own web page with links to the topics that are directly relevant to it.
There are 2 types of roles: roles with direct impact on the accessibility of web content, and roles with influence.
Roles with direct impact
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
People performing 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
See the following blog posts on Digital.govt.nz