There are some good guides available to help you make your websites and online content accessible.

These guides come from the Australian Government.

The Digital Service Standard explains the best ways to plan and create online services for government.

A good starting point is Criterion 9: Make it accessible.

These other parts of the Digital Service Standard are also very helpful:

The Design System has a set of tools to help designers and developers build online products and services.

The Content Strategy Guide explains how to make your online content work well.

The Style Manual explains how to write good online content.

The Style Manual has a section on inclusive language.

It also explains why you should make your content easy to read.

The service design and delivery process helps teams build better services for all users.

Accessibility on mobile

It’s important for online content to be accessible on:

  • mobile phones
  • tablets.

Mobile Accessibility at W3C explains the rules for accessibility on mobile.

WCAG 2.1 covers the accessibility of apps.

Portable Document Format (PDF)

PDFs are a popular way of publishing documents online.

PDFs can be made accessible.

But they are not always easy to use on mobile devices.

This means that we can never publish a PDF on its own.

We must always offer another version as well.

Ideally, content should be published as a web page, made using HTML.

HTML is a markup language used to write web pages.

Web pages are easier:

  • to make accessible
  • to use on all devices.

Multimedia

Multimedia includes video and audio files.

The accessibility rules for multimedia are covered under WCAG.

The section that applies is Guideline 1.2 – Time-based Media.

Other software

Software is a name for computer programs.

Not all software is used online.

For example, we only use some software on our computers at work.

We don’t get it from the internet.

There are rules about the way we buy and use this software.

We explain this in more detail on the next page.