Most small business websites in Australia have never been checked for accessibility. Not because the owners don’t care, but because nobody ever told them it was a thing — and because the site looks perfectly fine on the laptop it was signed off on.
That is worth revisiting this year. In November 2025 the Australian Human Rights Commission published updated guidance on digital accessibility, and it lifted the recommended benchmark to WCAG 2.2 at Level AA. The Commission’s older advisory notes had pointed at WCAG 2.0 AA for years. If you built your site against that older reference — or, far more likely, against nothing at all — the goalposts have quietly moved.
Here is what the change actually means for a business in Pakenham, Officer, Berwick, Narre Warren, Cranbourne or Bunyip, and what you can check yourself before you spend a dollar.
What the Commission actually says
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are published by the W3C, the international body that sets web standards. WCAG 2.2 was published on 5 October 2023, with a maintenance update in December 2024. It organises accessibility around four principles: content should be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. Each guideline sits at one of three conformance levels — A, AA or AAA.
The Commission’s updated position is that organisations “should conform with WCAG 2.2 at a minimum Level AA and consider appropriate Level AAA success criteria.” Its guidance also makes the point that WCAG is “required by government and non-government sectors alike.”
That second half is the bit small business owners usually miss. This is not a government-websites-only rule.
Why this applies to a private business, not just a council
There is no separate “web accessibility act” in Australia. The obligation comes from the Disability Discrimination Act 1992, which requires that providers of goods and services do not discriminate against people with disability. The Commission’s long-standing view is that a website is a service, and that equal access “is required by the DDA where it can reasonably be provided.”
The phrase where it can reasonably be provided matters. A three-person business is not held to the same standard as a bank. But “reasonable” is not the same as “optional”, and the things that break a website for a screen reader user are usually cheap to fix — they are almost always mistakes rather than deliberate design decisions.
The scale is not small either. The Australian Bureau of Statistics’ 2022 Survey of Disability, Ageing and Carers, released in July 2024, found 5.5 million Australians — 21.4% of the population — had disability, up from 17.7% in 2018. Not all of those people face barriers on a website. But a meaningful share do, and every one of them is a customer who either completes your booking form or gives up on it.
A note on what this article is: Madexify is a web and branding studio, not a law firm, and none of this is legal advice. The Commission publishes its own guidance free of charge, and it is written for a general audience — read it directly if you want the authoritative version.
What WCAG 2.2 added that 2.0 didn’t have
WCAG 2.2 introduced nine new success criteria. Six of them sit at Level A or AA — which is the level the Commission is asking for — and they are strikingly practical. They read less like standards-body language and more like a list of the things that annoy everybody:
- Target Size (Minimum), AA — clickable things need to be at least 24 by 24 CSS pixels, or spaced far enough apart to be hit reliably. This is the “why can’t I tap the right menu item on my phone” criterion.
- Dragging Movements, AA — if something requires a drag, there has to be another way to do it that doesn’t. Image carousels and sliders are the usual offenders.
- Focus Not Obscured (Minimum), AA — when you tab through a page with the keyboard, the thing you have landed on can’t be hidden behind a sticky header or a cookie banner.
- Accessible Authentication (Minimum), AA — a login can’t demand that you solve a puzzle or transcribe distorted text with no alternative available.
- Consistent Help, A — if you offer contact details or a help link, they should sit in the same place from page to page.
- Redundant Entry, A — don’t make someone type the same information twice in one process.
WCAG 2.2 also retired one criterion: 4.1.1 Parsing is now obsolete, because modern browsers handle the underlying markup issues themselves. And because 2.2 is backwards compatible, content that conforms to 2.2 also conforms to 2.1 and 2.0 — so there is no need to chase three versions.
Four checks you can run on your own site this afternoon
You do not need software or a consultant to find the most common problems. These four take about twenty minutes between them.
1. Put the mouse down
Load your homepage and press Tab repeatedly. Can you reach every link, button and form field? Can you always see where you are? Can you open and — critically — close the menu, and any pop-up, without touching the mouse? A keyboard trap, where focus gets stuck inside a modal, is one of the most common and most damaging faults on a small business site.
2. Check your images have alt text
In WordPress, open your Media Library and switch to list view. Anything decorative can be left blank deliberately. Anything that carries meaning — a photo of the product, a graphic with words baked into it, your logo — needs a short description. Text inside an image is invisible to a screen reader and to Google.
3. Read your link text out loud, on its own
Screen reader users often navigate by jumping from link to link, stripped of the surrounding sentence. “Click here”, “read more” and “learn more” tell them nothing. “See our web design pricing” tells them everything. This one costs nothing and improves the site for everyone.
4. Look hard at your colour contrast
Light grey text on white is the single most common accessibility failure in modern web design, and it usually arrives as a style choice rather than an accident. Body text needs a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 against its background. Free contrast checkers will tell you in seconds, and it is generally a one-line change in the stylesheet.
Where accessibility and search visibility overlap
It is worth being honest here: accessibility is not a direct Google ranking factor, and anyone selling it to you as an SEO trick is overselling. But the overlap is real and mechanical, not mystical.
Search engines and screen readers are both, in effect, non-visual visitors. They both rely on the same underlying structure: a sensible heading order, descriptive link text, alt attributes, form labels, and semantic markup that says what an element is rather than just how it looks. Fix accessibility properly and you have also fixed most of the on-page structure that search crawlers use to understand your pages. The same is true of AI answer engines, which parse the page rather than look at it.
The commercial argument is simpler still. An unusable form is an unusable form. If a customer can’t complete your enquiry form with a keyboard, the lost revenue is identical whether the cause was a disability, a broken trackpad or a fussy phone screen.
What it costs to fix
We won’t quote you a number for a job we haven’t seen, and you should be sceptical of anyone who does. But the shape of the cost is predictable.
Alt text, link wording, form labels and contrast corrections are content and stylesheet work — usually a few hours, and often something a business owner can do themselves once they know what to look for. Keyboard traps, unlabelled custom widgets, inaccessible sliders and third-party booking embeds are development work, because something has to be rebuilt or replaced. And a site built on a theme or a page builder that generates poor markup will keep producing new problems, which is a rebuild conversation rather than a fix-it conversation. If you are weighing that up, our guide to what a website really costs covers how those decisions play out in a budget.
The cheapest time to deal with any of this is while a site is being designed. Retrofitting accessibility onto a finished build is where the money goes.
Where Madexify fits
We build and maintain websites for small and medium businesses across Melbourne’s south-east, and accessibility is part of how we work rather than an upsell — semantic markup, keyboard-navigable menus, real contrast, labelled forms. If you already have a site, we are happy to run through the four checks above with you and tell you plainly whether you have a problem worth spending money on. Sometimes the answer is no, and we will say so.
If you would like a look at yours, email contact@madexify.com or call +61 424 485 087. You can also see the rest of what we do on our services page.
Sources: Australian Human Rights Commission — Standards and guidelines for digital accessibility (published 15 November 2025); W3C Web Accessibility Initiative — WCAG 2 Overview; W3C — What’s New in WCAG 2.2; Australian Bureau of Statistics — Disability, Ageing and Carers, Australia, 2022 (released 4 July 2024).
