The NDIS Website Accessibility Checklist
Whether you've already got a website or you're about to build one, this is a plain-English checklist to work through yourself. It's written for NDIS providers — support coordinators, support-worker agencies, plan managers, SIL/SDA providers, allied health — not web developers. Every check takes about two minutes, and most of them don't need any technical tools at all.
Free to read right now — no email address required. Scroll down and start ticking things off. Want a copy to keep, print, or work through with a pen and your team? See the options just below.
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Why this matters more in the disability sector
Every website benefits from being accessible. For an NDIS provider, it matters twice over. Some of the people looking at your site — participants, their families, support coordinators searching on someone's behalf — will be using a screen reader, magnifying text well beyond 100%, navigating with a keyboard alone because a mouse isn't an option, or reading with a cognitive disability that makes dense jargon genuinely hard to follow. If your site doesn't work for them, it's not a minor inconvenience — for some visitors, it's the difference between being able to find you at all and giving up.
We build every site to WCAG 2.1, Level AA — the internationally recognised accessibility standard — as our baseline, not a stretch goal. This checklist covers the checks that stem from that standard, translated into plain language and things you can genuinely test yourself in a couple of minutes each, no code or specialist software required for most of them.
Text & readability
If people have to work hard to read your words, some of them will stop trying. These checks are about making the words themselves easy to take in.
- Writing sits at an easy reading level. How to check: read a paragraph out loud. If you stumble, lose your place, or need to reread a sentence to understand it, simplify it.
- Sentences are short. How to check: pick three sentences at random and count the words. If more than one runs past 25 words, split it into two.
- Jargon and acronyms are explained. How to check: scan a page for capital-letter acronyms and NDIS terms — check each is spelled out or explained at least once on that page.
- Body text is a readable size. How to check: right-click the main paragraph text, choose "Inspect", and check the computed font-size is 16px or larger.
- Lines of text aren't too wide. How to check: on a desktop screen, look at a line of body text — if your eye travels further than about 75 characters before it wraps, the column needs narrowing.
- Headings are real headings, not just bold text. How to check: view the page source (Ctrl/Cmd+U) or switch on your browser's reader mode — a sensible heading outline means they're genuine heading tags, not styled paragraphs.
Colour & contrast
Low-contrast text and colour-only cues are invisible to a lot more people than you'd expect — not just people who are colour-blind.
- Body text meets 4.5:1 contrast against its background. How to check: use a free tool like the WebAIM Contrast Checker — type in your text colour and background colour as hex codes and confirm it passes "AA" for normal text.
- Large text and buttons meet 3:1 contrast. How to check: same tool as above, but check the pass for "large text" or graphical objects, which has a lower bar than ordinary body text.
- Meaning isn't carried by colour alone. How to check: turn on a grayscale display filter (built into most phones, and some browsers) and confirm the page still makes sense with no colour at all.
- Links are distinguishable from plain text. How to check: look at a paragraph containing a link — could someone who can't tell colours apart still pick the link out from the text around it?
- Hover and focus states are visible. How to check: move your mouse over a few links and buttons and watch for a visible colour, underline or outline change, not just a cursor change.
Keyboard & navigation
Not everyone uses a mouse or a touchscreen. Everything on your site should be reachable and usable with a keyboard alone.
- You can tab through the whole page. How to check: click the address bar, then press Tab repeatedly through the entire page and confirm nothing gets skipped.
- Focus is always visible. How to check: while tabbing through, confirm every single stop shows a clear outline or highlight — never an invisible focus state.
- A skip link is present. How to check: load the homepage, click the address bar, then press Tab once — a "skip to main content" link should appear.
- Tab order follows a logical order. How to check: compare your Tab-key journey against what your eye would naturally do reading the page top to bottom.
- Nothing traps your keyboard. How to check: open any menu, popup or widget on the site and confirm both Tab and Escape let you get back out of it.
- Menus are fully operable without a mouse. How to check: on both desktop and mobile view, open the main navigation menu using only Enter, Space and Tab — no mouse or touch.
Images & media
Images and video carry information — make sure that information is available to people who can't see or hear them.
- Alt text says what actually matters. How to check: right-click an important image, choose "Inspect", and check the alt attribute describes what it's showing or doing — not "image123.jpg".
- Decorative images are marked as decorative. How to check: inspect a purely decorative image the same way — its alt attribute should be present but empty (alt=""), not missing entirely.
- No important text is locked inside an image. How to check: try to select and copy text you can see on the page — if it's actually part of a picture, you won't be able to.
- Videos have captions. How to check: play a video with the sound off and confirm you can still follow what's being said via captions.
- Links to documents and media describe the destination. How to check: scan the page for links like "Download our brochure (PDF)" rather than "click here" — each should make sense read on its own.
Forms
Enquiry and referral forms are often the whole point of a provider's website — they need to be genuinely usable, not just present.
- Every field has a visible, permanent label. How to check: click into a field and start typing — if the only description of what it's for disappears, that's placeholder text, not a real label.
- Error messages say what to fix. How to check: submit a form with a field left blank or wrong and read the message — could someone unfamiliar with the form actually act on it?
- Required fields are marked before you submit. How to check: look at the form before touching it — can you tell which fields are required without submitting first and getting an error?
- Tap targets are large enough on a phone. How to check: on a phone, try tapping a checkbox or small icon with your thumb — if you keep missing or hitting the wrong control, it's too small.
- Labels are properly connected to their fields. How to check: click directly on a field's label text, not the input box itself — the cursor should jump straight into the matching field.
Structure & links
Good underlying structure is what lets screen readers, search engines and browser features work properly at all.
- Each page has exactly one main heading (H1). How to check: view source (Ctrl/Cmd+U) and search for "<h1" — there should be exactly one match per page.
- Link text is descriptive. How to check: read just the link text on a page, out of context — "See our pricing" tells you something; "click here" repeated ten times doesn't.
- Every page has a unique, useful title. How to check: open a few different pages and check the browser tab text is different and makes sense for each one, not the business name repeated everywhere.
- The page's language is set correctly. How to check: view source (Ctrl/Cmd+U) and confirm the opening <html> tag includes lang="en-AU" or lang="en", so screen readers use the right pronunciation.
- Reading order matches visual order. How to check: turn off the stylesheet in your browser's developer tools, or use reader mode, and confirm the page still makes sense read top to bottom.
Mobile & zoom
A lot of your visitors will be on a phone, and some will need to zoom in well beyond what a desktop layout was designed for.
- The page works at 200% zoom. How to check: press Ctrl/Cmd and "+" a few times, or set browser zoom to 200%, then scroll through the page checking nothing is cut off or overlapping.
- Pinch-to-zoom isn't disabled. How to check: on a phone, try pinching to zoom in on the page — it should respond, not stay locked at one size.
- The whole site works one-handed on a phone. How to check: try browsing the whole site on your own phone using only one hand and thumb, start to finish.
- Tap targets have breathing room. How to check: on a phone, tap between two nearby links or buttons a few times and notice how often you hit the wrong one.
- Content isn't locked to one screen orientation. How to check: rotate your phone while on a page and confirm nothing breaks or gets cut off in landscape.
Motion, time & safety
Movement, autoplay and time limits can be more than just annoying — for some visitors they're genuinely disorienting or unsafe.
- Reduced motion is respected. How to check: turn on "reduce motion" in your device's accessibility settings, reload the site, and confirm animations calm down or stop.
- Nothing autoplays with sound. How to check: load every page with a video or audio embed and listen — does anything start playing on its own with the sound on?
- Nothing flashes rapidly. How to check: watch any animated or video content for a few seconds — flag anything that flickers more than a couple of times per second.
- No unexpected timeouts. How to check: if a form takes a while to fill in, check whether it warns you before timing out, rather than silently discarding what you've typed.
How did you score?
However many boxes you ticked, this checklist only covers what anyone can spot without specialist tools — it's a genuinely useful first pass, not a full audit. A proper WCAG 2.1 AA audit goes further: automated scanning tools, testing with real assistive technology, checking every page and every component rather than a representative sample, and looking at things this list can't, like whether custom widgets announce themselves correctly to a screen reader. Getting through this list is a real win either way — it's just not the same thing as a complete audit, and we won't pretend it is.
Want us to run this over your site for you?
That's exactly what our free Front Door Report is — we work through checks like these (and go further) against your actual site and tell you plainly what we find. No obligation, no pressure.
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Mention which items on this checklist you're unsure about, or just send us your website address — we'll take a look and reply honestly with what we find.
Ready for a site that passes this checklist by design?
Every site we build starts from this same standard, so you're not left ticking boxes after the fact.