Website accessibility obligations in Australia (DDA and WCAG)

No Australian statute requires a private business website to conform to WCAG by name. The obligation comes from discrimination law. WCAG is the technical standard used to show whether that obligation has been met. Understanding that order — law first, standard second — explains most of what follows.

This page is general information so that you know what to ask about. It is not legal advice, and it is not a statement about your website. An accessibility obligation is decided on the facts of a particular service and a particular user. If accessibility is a live issue for your business, get advice specific to your circumstances.

The accessibility instrument that applies in Australia

The Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (Cth) makes disability discrimination unlawful in defined areas of public life. Section 24 deals with the provision of goods, services and facilities. A website through which a business offers information, bookings, enquiries or sales is generally understood to be part of how that business provides its goods and services, which is why the section is the one usually named in this context.

Complaints under the Act are made to the Australian Human Rights Commission, which handles them through a conciliation process before any court proceeding arises. A complaint about the Sydney Olympic Games website was upheld by the Commission’s predecessor body in 2000, and that decision is the reference point most Australian discussion of web accessibility still returns to.

The Act also contains defences, including unjustifiable hardship, which is assessed against the circumstances rather than granted automatically. Whether it is available to a given business in a given situation is exactly the sort of question that needs advice rather than a web page.

There is no small-business exemption in Australian disability discrimination law

This is the point most often assumed the other way around.

The Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) currently exempts many small businesses from the Australian Privacy Principles by reference to an annual turnover threshold. That exemption has been the subject of active reform, and its removal was agreed in principle in the Government’s response to the Privacy Act Review. As at 3 August 2026 no second-tranche Bill has been introduced and no commencement date is legislated.

Dates for this change circulate widely in industry commentary. None of them is traceable to a tabled or passed instrument. At least some appear to be a conflation with a different reform, on a different timetable, covering a much narrower set of businesses. This page does not repeat any of them. That is the same reason it does not state the turnover threshold: a figure that cannot be sourced is worse than no figure. It is a change to watch if you hold customer data, not a date to plan against.

The Disability Discrimination Act contains no equivalent turnover exemption. Its obligations do not switch on at a revenue figure. A sole trader’s site and a listed company’s site are subject to the same Act.

What WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, are, and what the levels mean

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are published by the World Wide Web Consortium. WCAG 2.2 is the current recommendation in that series. Its success criteria are graded into three conformance levels:

Level A is the minimum set. Failing it usually means some people cannot use part of the site at all.

Level AA is the level named in Australian policy and guidance material. In April 2025 the Australian Human Rights Commission replaced its long-standing World Wide Web Access advisory notes with Guidelines on Equal Access to Digital Goods and Services, which name WCAG 2.2 Level AA as the minimum and extend the scope beyond websites to mobile applications, AI-driven tools, connected devices and self-service machines such as kiosks and ticketing terminals. The Digital Service Standard applies WCAG to Australian Government services rather than to private businesses.

The Commission’s guidelines are guidance rather than law — they do not create the obligation, the Disability Discrimination Act does — but they are the clearest published statement of what the Commission considers equal access to require, and a business working to an older version of WCAG because “the guidance lags” is working from a position that is no longer true.

Level AAA is not meant to be met across an entire site for all content — the W3C says as much itself. A supplier promising blanket AAA conformance either does not know that, or is not being straight with you.

The short list that catches most problems

Most failures found on ordinary Australian business sites sit in a small number of places:

• Semantic headings in a logical order, rather than text styled to look like a heading
• Keyboard operation of every control, including menus, sliders and modal dialogs, with no keyboard trap
• Contrast between text and its background sufficient for the relevant success criterion
• Alternative text for images that carry meaning, and empty alternative text for images that are decorative
• Form labels programmatically associated with their fields, and errors identified in text rather than by colour alone
• Visible focus so that a keyboard user can see where they are
• Captions on video, and transcripts where audio carries information

None of that is exotic, and most of it costs far less to build in than to retrofit.

What an automated scan and assistive technologies can and cannot tell you

A large share of the WCAG success criteria cannot be checked by software at all. They need human judgement. A machine can confirm that an image has alternative text. It cannot tell you whether the text describes the image. It can confirm headings exist. It cannot tell you whether the outline makes sense. Estimates of how much of WCAG automated tooling actually detects land somewhere between about a third and a half. The exact fraction matters less than the reason for it.

That has a practical consequence when someone sells you an accessibility check. A green result from a scanner is not a finding of conformance. It is not a defence to anything. If a supplier’s report is a tool’s output with a logo on it, ask three things: which criteria were assessed by a person, how keyboard operation was tested, and whether any assistive technology was used.

What to ask a supplier about accessibility standards and Australian Government guidelines

• Which WCAG version and conformance level is being worked to, stated in the contract rather than in an email
• Which success criteria were tested manually, and by whom
• Whether keyboard-only operation was tested on the finished site, not the design
• Whether accessibility is included in the build or quoted as a later phase, and if later, what the scope of that phase is
• What happens to conformance when the site is edited after handover, because most regressions arrive through the content editor

What to do next

Test one thing yourself before you speak to anyone: unplug the mouse and try to complete your own enquiry form. That takes two minutes and tends to end the debate about whether a problem exists.

The engineering view of the same subject, and why retrofitting costs several times what building it in costs, is on development work in Brisbane.