Accessibility is good design, good business, and now, good practice.

For a long time, web accessibility was treated as a tick-box exercise. Something the legal team raised once a year. That has changed. Accessibility now sits at the intersection of brand, growth, and risk. The brands that get it right reach more people, convert better, and rank higher. The ones that ignore it pay for it later.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 is the current global benchmark. Level AA is the standard most regulators, governments, and procurement teams require. It covers four principles, around fifty success criteria, and applies to almost every part of a modern website.

This page is the practical version. What WCAG 2.2 AA actually means, where most New Zealand websites fall short, and what we do about it when we run an audit.

If you remember nothing else, remember this. Accessibility is not charity work, and it is not a one-off project. It is a discipline that quietly improves almost every metric you care about. More users reached. Fewer drop-offs. Better search visibility. Lower legal exposure. A reputation worth having.

Accessibility is not charity work. It is the cheapest growth lever most websites have left.

The cost of inaccessible design is bigger than most teams realise.

Accessibility issues quietly drain conversion, search visibility, and trust. They also create real legal exposure for both private and public sector organisations. A few numbers worth holding in your head.

The flip side. Accessibility improvements consistently lift SEO, mobile usability, page speed, and conversion. The same things that help screen-reader users also help search engines, mobile users on flaky connections, and anyone using your site one-handed on the bus.

What does the law actually say in Aotearoa?

New Zealand does not have a single, consolidated digital accessibility act. Instead, the obligations come from a few overlapping places. We help clients understand which apply to them and what compliance looks like in practice.

Public sector

Government agencies must follow the New Zealand Government Web Accessibility Standard and the Web Usability Standard. Both reference WCAG 2.2 Level AA. If you are a Crown entity, a department, or you supply websites to one through procurement, this is non-negotiable.

Private sector

The Human Rights Act 1993 prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in the supply of goods, facilities, and services. Case law and guidance from the Human Rights Commission make clear that this includes digital services. While there has not yet been a major NZ courtroom test of website accessibility, complaints are rising and the regulatory direction is clear.

The international ripple

If you sell into the EU, the European Accessibility Act took effect on 28 June 2025 and applies to most consumer-facing digital services. If you operate in Australia, the Disability Discrimination Act has produced multiple successful court actions. If you have US customers, ADA Title III lawsuits over website accessibility have grown every year for the last decade.

Beyond compliance, who actually benefits?

Accessibility is sometimes framed as a small group's problem. The reality is broader. The same design choices that help disabled users also help a much wider audience.

Older users with declining vision benefit from larger touch targets and stronger contrast. Mobile users in low light, on cracked screens, or with one hand free benefit from clear focus states and simple navigation. Non-native English speakers benefit from plain language. Search engines benefit from semantic HTML and meaningful alt text. Anyone using voice control, dictation, or a smart speaker benefits from accessible labels. The audience for accessible design is, in practice, everyone.

Perceivable. Operable. Understandable. Robust.

Every WCAG success criterion sits under one of four principles, often shortened to POUR. They are designed to be human, not legalistic. Here is what each one actually means in plain language, and what it tends to look like when sites get it wrong.

The eight accessibility failures we find on almost every site.

After auditing dozens of New Zealand websites, the same issues come up again and again. None of them are fatal. All of them are fixable. Most are far cheaper to fix than to ignore.

Five Website Accessibility myths that keep teams stuck.

Accessibility has more bad advice circulating about it than almost any other digital topic. Here are the five we hear most, and what is actually true.

Not sure where you stand against WCAG 2.2 AA.

Our audit is not a 200-page automated dump. It is a focused review by accessibility-trained designers and developers, combining automated scanning with manual testing. You leave with three things: a clear pass/fail picture, a prioritised fix list, and a roadmap to AA conformance.

Automated tools catch around 30 to 40 percent of accessibility issues. The rest live in human judgement. Is this alt text actually useful? Does this error message tell the user how to recover? Does this video have sound that matters? That is where our manual testing focuses. The result is an audit you can act on, not a wall of warnings to triage.

What we test

Four steps from request to roadmap.

Most audits take two to three weeks from kickoff to delivery, depending on the size of the site. We keep it tight on purpose. Long audits stop being useful.

Frequently asked questions.

What is WCAG 2.2 AA in plain English?

WCAG stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Version 2.2 is the latest, published in October 2023. Level AA is the middle tier of conformance and the level most laws and procurement standards reference. It covers about 50 specific criteria across the four POUR principles. Level A is the bare minimum. Level AAA is rarely required and often impossible to meet on a content-heavy site.

Is my private business legally required to comply?

If you only operate in New Zealand, there is no specific accessibility act that targets private websites. However, the Human Rights Act prohibits disability discrimination in services, and that includes digital services. If you operate in the EU, UK, US, or Australia, the legal exposure is significantly higher and growing every year. Even where law does not require it, procurement, partnerships, and brand reputation increasingly do.

Can I just install an accessibility overlay widget?

No. Overlays are widgets that promise to fix accessibility automatically. They do not. Multiple lawsuits have been filed against companies that relied on them. Disability advocacy groups, including the Accessibility Statement Generator and over 800 accessibility experts, have publicly called for them to be discontinued. Real accessibility comes from real code and content changes.

How long does an audit take?

Most basic audits are completed in a week or so.  A large website with multiple templates, a logged-in area, and a checkout flow takes closer to four and will be a charged activity. We agree the timeline at the scoping call.

What does it cost?

Audit pricing depends on the size of the site and the number of unique templates. We offer fixed-fee audits in three tiers, starting from a single-page or small-site review for free through to full multi-template audits. We confirm a price after the scoping call and never bill for surprises.

Will I need to rebuild the site to fix issues?

Almost never. Most issues are content, code, or design changes that can be made inside your existing site. The roadmap we deliver is structured around effort versus impact, so your team can knock out high-value fixes first without waiting for a redesign cycle. 

Do you also help us fix the issues?

Yes, if you want us to. Some clients hand the report to their internal team. Others bring us in to do the remediation work, retest, and produce an accessibility statement at the end. We are happy with either, and the audit is the same regardless.

What is WCAG 2.2 vs 2.1?

WCAG 2.2 added nine new criteria that most matter for mobile users, cognitive accessibility, and authentication. The most talked-about additions are minimum target size, dragging movements, focus appearance, and accessible authentication. If your last audit was against WCAG 2.1, there are real new things to check.