Jurisdictions — Asia-Pacific
Website accessibility in Australia: what the DDA actually requires of client sites
The question Australian clients are asking
Australia has no "website accessibility act" with a headline deadline — so Australian businesses often assume there's nothing to comply with. That assumption has been wrong since 2000. Here is the actual position an agency can give a client.
What is true, verified
- The Disability Discrimination Act 1992 covers websites. The DDA prohibits discrimination in the provision of goods, services and facilities — and Australian authorities and courts have treated websites as within that scope for decades.
- The precedent is old and famous: Maguire v SOCOG (2000). A blind user complained that the Sydney Olympics website was inaccessible; the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission found against the organising committee and ordered changes plus compensation. It remains the landmark: an inaccessible website can be unlawful discrimination in Australia.
- Complaints keep happening — and they settle. The best-known modern example: a blind user's Federal Court case against Coles over its online shopping site (2014) ended in a settlement with accessibility commitments. Settlement is the norm, which is exactly why "no one gets sued for this" is a misreading — cases resolve before judgment.
- The benchmark authorities point to is WCAG. The Australian Human Rights Commission's advisory guidance on web access points to WCAG conformance as the practical way to meet the DDA duty; Australian government sites have WCAG obligations under the Digital Service Standard. Check the AHRC's current advisory note for the version it cites before quoting one to a client.
How to check a client site yourself
- Accessibility signals: run an automated WCAG checker (axe-core is the open-source standard) on the key templates. Automated checks catch what complaints cite first: missing text alternatives, unlabelled form fields, contrast failures.
- Consent posture: load the site cold and note what fires before any consent — and what the privacy policy claims (Privacy Act 1988 / APPs for in-scope entities).
- Broken links and SEO basics: one pass should also cover the 404s and missing metadata the client will ask about anyway.
- Document what you saw: capture the page state behind every finding.
The honest shortcut
We built SiteComply to do exactly that pass — accessibility signals, consent posture, broken links, SEO basics — in a single $29 audit where every finding points to the exact page state we observed. White-label friendly, built for agency portfolios, and it never claims more than it verified.