A questionnaire about whether people can use your website

There are plenty of automated testing tools that will scan your website and give you an accessibility score. This is not one, and the reason is worth understanding before you use anything that is.

Why this is a questionnaire and not automated testing

Automated tooling detects somewhere between roughly a third and a half of the WCAG success criteria, and most of the rest genuinely needs manual testing by a person rather than a scan. That is not a limitation of any particular product; it is structural. A machine can confirm that an image has alternative text. It cannot tell you whether that text meaningfully describes the image to someone using a screen reader. It can confirm headings exist. It cannot tell you whether the outline makes sense to somebody who cannot see the page, using a screen reader or other assistive technology of their own.

So a scanner’s green result means “nothing I am able to detect is wrong”. Presented as a score out of 100, it reads as “this site is accessible”, and those are very different statements.

That gap matters commercially, not just intellectually. Obligations under the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 sit with the business operating the site. A business that relied on an automated pass mark, and then received a complaint, would find that the pass mark was never evidence of anything. A tool that encourages that reliance has created the exposure it appeared to remove — which is why nothing here returns a pass, a percentage or a certificate.

How to read the result

The result is a band, describing what your answers indicate and where the accessibility issues appear to be. It is not a score, there is no threshold to clear, and answering everything well does not mean the site meets any standard — the fourteen questions cover a small fraction of WCAG, and a genuine audit would look at far more.

If a third or more of your answers are unsure, the result says so and stops. That is the honest output: an unsure answer is not a failing grade, it means nobody has looked, and the next step is finding out rather than fixing.

What to do with it

The single most useful thing on this page needs no software. Unplug your mouse and try to complete your own enquiry form using only the keyboard. Most Australian small-business sites fail that, most owners have never tried it, and it takes two minutes.

Beyond that, the obligations themselves and what the Australian Human Rights Commission’s 2025 guidance actually says are on website accessibility in Australia. If accessibility is a live issue for your business rather than a curiosity, that page ends with the questions to put to a supplier — and none of this is legal advice.