Does your Perth business website need to meet accessibility (WCAG) standards? In practice, yes. WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, is the benchmark accessibility standard used across Australia, and while no law names a specific version for private businesses, the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 makes it unlawful to provide goods and services in a way that excludes people with disability. A website that fails basic accessibility is a complaint waiting to happen, and it is also losing you customers.
Around one in five Australians lives with disability, per the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and every one of them books plumbers, buys tools and hires services like everyone else. Accessibility is practical, not political. This article is general information, not legal advice.
What WCAG actually is
WCAG is published by the World Wide Web Consortium, the standards body behind the web itself. The current version, WCAG 2.2, was released in October 2023 and refined the earlier 2.1 guidelines with more mobile and cognitive accessibility criteria. Conformance is measured at three levels: A, the minimum; AA, the widely adopted target; and AAA, an enhanced standard few sites pursue across the board. When people say a site meets WCAG, they nearly always mean Level AA.
What the law asks of a Perth business
The Disability Discrimination Act 1992 does not mention WCAG by name. What it does is make it unlawful to discriminate against a person on the basis of disability in the provision of goods, services and facilities, and Australian tribunals have accepted that websites count. In the leading early case, a blind man, Bruce Maguire, successfully complained that the Sydney Olympics website was inaccessible to him, and the site was ordered fixed.
Government sets the practical benchmark: Australian Government departments are required to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA, and that is the level most accessibility professionals recommend to private businesses as the sensible target. For a small business, the honest position is this: the law is a floor, the standard is known, and the fix is usually smaller than the fear.
The business case beyond compliance
Accessible sites are simply better sites for everyone. Alt text helps Google understand your images. Clear headings and descriptive links help your search rankings. Readable contrast helps the customer squinting at a phone in the sun. Fast, predictable navigation helps the person in a hurry, which is most of them. The overlap between accessibility, usability and search is close enough that fixing one usually improves the other two.
A practical WCAG baseline for a small business site
If you do nothing else, get these right:
- Alt text on every meaningful image, describing what the image shows.
- Text contrast that comfortably clears the WCAG AA threshold, no pale grey on white.
- Full keyboard operation: every menu, form and button reachable without a mouse.
- Captions on video content.
- Proper labels on every form field, not placeholder text that vanishes.
- Link text that says where it goes, never a bare click here.
- Text that resizes to 200 per cent without breaking the layout.
- A visible focus indicator so keyboard users can see where they are.
How to test where you stand
Three free tests catch most problems. First, unplug your mouse and walk the site with keyboard alone. Second, turn on the screen reader built into your phone, VoiceOver on iPhone or TalkBack on Android, and try to complete an enquiry. Third, run key pages through a free checker such as WAVE or the Lighthouse audit in Chrome. For a serious site, a professional audit against WCAG 2.2 AA gives you a prioritised fix list rather than a raw score.
Frequently asked questions
Is WCAG 2.2 legally required for Australian businesses?
No Australian law names a WCAG version as a private-sector mandate. The Disability Discrimination Act is the operative law, and WCAG is the standard used to assess whether a site discriminates. Meeting WCAG 2.1 or 2.2 at Level AA is the accepted way to manage that risk.
Does the Disability Discrimination Act apply to small businesses?
Yes. The Act has no small business exemption, and complaints have been made against businesses of every size. The practical response is proportionate: fix the high-traffic templates and core journeys first.
What is the difference between Level A, AA and AAA?
Level A covers the most basic failures, Level AA covers the issues that affect most users with disability, and Level AAA is an enhanced level that even strong sites rarely meet everywhere. AA is the standard target.
How much of my website has to pass?
Prioritise the pages that carry the business: home, services, contact and checkout. A pragmatic programme that fixes templates and core journeys first is normal practice, and full conformance can follow in stages.
Make your site work for every customer
Accessibility is built into the sites we design, from contrast to code structure. See our website design and development service, or book a discovery call to get an honest read on how your current site scores.
