Accessibility

We want this site to work for everyone who needs to use it — including people using a screen reader, people who cannot use a mouse, people who need larger text, and people on a slow or intermittent connection. That last one matters more here than for most sites: a good part of our region has patchy mobile coverage, and a website that only works on fast broadband is inaccessible in a way that rarely gets counted.

Tell us if something does not work

If any part of this site is difficult or impossible for you to use, please tell us — email or ring us using the details in the footer. Say what you were trying to do, what happened, and what you were using if you know (a screen reader, keyboard only, a phone, a particular browser). We will fix what we can, and tell you plainly if something will take a while.

And if the website is the barrier, it does not have to be the route. Ring us and we will do whatever you needed to do on here over the phone instead. The website exists to make things easier; where it does not, a person will.

What we aim for

We build to WCAG 2.2 Level AA — the international accessibility standard, at the level Australian government and most large organisations target. That is a target we design and test against, not a certificate; we are telling you the standard we hold ourselves to so that you can hold us to it as well.

What we have done

• Text you can resize. Body text starts at 18 pixels and the whole layout is built in relative units, so browser zoom and larger system text sizes reflow the page rather than clipping it.
• Contrast that holds up. Text and background combinations meet the AA contrast ratio. Our bronze brand colour is used for underlines, borders and emphasis rather than for body text, because at text size it does not have the contrast to carry the words.
• Keyboard access throughout. Every link and control can be reached and used with a keyboard, and the focus indicator stays clearly visible on light and dark backgrounds alike — it is drawn in two tones for exactly that reason. There is a “skip to content” link at the top of every page, and it moves your place in the page as well as the view, so the next key press carries on from the content rather than sending you back into the menu.
• Nothing moves on its own. No carousels, no autoplay, no parallax, no animation that starts without you. Where movement does happen it honours your system “reduce motion” setting.
• Large tap targets. Buttons, menu items and standalone links — including every phone number and email address — are at least 44 pixels, the standard’s minimum and simply easier on a phone. A link inside a sentence stays the size of the sentence, which the standard allows.
• Real headings and real landmarks. Headings describe the structure of the page rather than being chosen for their size, so a screen reader can navigate it.
• Almost no JavaScript. Our own pages are plain HTML and CSS — none of them needs a script to work. The one script we load is a privacy-preserving analytics beacon that sets no cookies and identifies nobody, and if it fails to arrive the page carries on exactly as it is. Pages load fast and work on old devices. The one exception is the secure upload form on our client tools page, which another company provides and which needs JavaScript to run (see below).
• Written to be understood. Plain English, short sentences, no unexplained jargon.

Where we know we fall short

• We have not yet had this site independently audited. An accessibility review by someone who is not us, including testing with a screen reader by someone who uses one daily, is planned before we consider the site finished. Our own testing catches a lot but not everything.
• Documents. Any PDF we publish in future will need its own accessibility work, which is a separate job from the website. If a document on this site is unusable for you, ask us for the content in another format and we will provide it.
• Third-party content. Where we link out to software providers or regulators, we do not control the accessibility of those sites. The same goes for the secure upload form on our client tools page, which is provided by another company and shown inside our page. If you can’t use it, ring us and we’ll arrange another way to get your documents to us.