For New Zealand government agencies, an accessible website is not optional. It is a requirement set by Cabinet and overseen by the Department of Internal Affairs. If your agency runs a public-facing website, it needs to meet a specific accessibility standard, and you are expected to be able to show that it does. The trouble is that most teams have no clear picture of where their site actually stands. An independent WCAG audit is how you find out.
The standard agencies have to meet
The New Zealand Government Web Accessibility Standard sets the bar. The current version requires conformance with WCAG 2.2 at Level AA. WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, is the international standard for making web content usable by people with disabilities. Level AA is the middle of its three tiers and the level governments around the world have settled on.
The standard is administered through the Government Chief Digital Officer at the Department of Internal Affairs. It applies to public-facing websites and to the web content agencies use internally. It is mandatory for Public Service departments and most other government organisations, and many councils and Crown entities hold themselves to it as well.
WCAG 2.2 Level AA covers things like colour contrast, keyboard operation, screen reader support, clear form labels, visible focus, and text that can be resized without breaking the layout. It is roughly 50 individual success criteria, each one a pass or a fail.
Who this applies to
If you are unsure whether the standard applies to your organisation, it most likely does. It reaches a wide group across the public sector:
- Public Service departments and ministries
- Most non-Public-Service departments and statutory bodies
- Crown entities, including regulators and authorities
- Local councils that have adopted the standard, which is now common practice
- Suppliers building or running websites for government, who are expected to deliver to the same standard through procurement requirements
Even where the standard is not strictly mandated, the expectation has shifted. Funders, partner agencies, and the public increasingly treat accessibility as a baseline rather than a bonus.
Why it matters beyond ticking a box
Around a quarter of New Zealanders live with a disability, according to Stats NZ. That is more than a million people who may rely on a screen reader, navigate by keyboard, need larger text, or depend on good colour contrast to read a page. When a government website fails on accessibility, it locks those people out of services they have every right to use. For a public agency, that is a service failure, not a technical detail.
There is a legal dimension too. The Human Rights Act 1993 prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability, and New Zealand has ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which includes access to information and communications. An inaccessible site carries real risk, and that risk grows as more services move online.
What an accessibility audit actually tells you
A proper audit measures your site against every WCAG 2.2 Level AA success criterion and tells you, in plain terms, where you pass and where you fall short. A good report does not stop at a list of problems. It rates each issue by how much it affects real users, points to the exact place it occurs, and explains how to fix it. That turns the standard from an abstract document into a clear plan of work your team can hand straight to developers.
The part teams often underestimate is testing. Automated tools are useful, but they only catch somewhere between a third and a half of accessibility issues. The rest, things like whether a screen reader announces a form error or whether the keyboard focus order makes sense, needs a person testing with the same assistive technology your visitors use. An audit that relies on a scanner alone will miss the failures that matter most.
A high automated score does not mean you pass
This is the trap we see most often. A site scores well on an automated checker and the team assumes it is compliant. In practice a page can score in the high nineties on a tool like Lighthouse and still fail WCAG at Level AA, because the failures that block people are usually the ones a machine cannot judge. Empty links, unlabelled controls, and poor focus management slip straight past automated checks. The only way to know your real conformance level is to test against every criterion by hand.
Most issues are easier to fix than they look
Large government sites can have thousands of pages, which makes a long list of accessibility issues feel overwhelming. The reassuring part is that those pages are almost always built from a small set of shared templates. The same handful of problems repeats across the navigation, the page header, and a few content patterns. Fix the issue once in the template and it is fixed everywhere that template appears. A good audit groups its findings this way, so what looks like a site-wide problem becomes a focused, manageable list.
How we approach it
We recently completed a WCAG 2.2 Level AA audit for the Electricity Authority, covering every unique template across a site of more than 4,000 pages. They received a conformance statement for each success criterion, a prioritised list of findings with severity ratings and screenshots, and a remediation roadmap their developers could act on straight away. You can read the case study to see exactly what an audit covers and what you receive.
If your agency needs to know where it stands, an audit is the right first step. It gives you an honest measure of your current conformance and a clear path to meeting the standard. Our web accessibility service covers auditing, remediation, accessible builds, and the conformance documentation you need for reporting and procurement. If you would like to talk it through, get in touch.