Our accessibility bar
MELBZ aims to meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2 Level AA across editorial pages — the standard published by the W3C and used by the Australian Government Digital Service Standard.
We do not currently claim full compliance. The site has 53,000+ pages on a long-running CMS, and full WCAG audits across that scale are an ongoing project, not a one-time tick-box.
What we test on every editorial template
- Keyboard navigation. Every link, button, form field and rotating widget can be reached and operated with Tab + Enter alone. The trending headline rotator pauses on focus.
- Colour contrast. Body text and UI controls meet WCAG AA contrast ratios (4.5:1 for normal text, 3:1 for large text and UI components). The cards and trending strip have been tested at the 4.5:1 minimum against our brand red and dark backgrounds.
- Reduced motion. The trending headline rotator and any hero animations honour
prefers-reduced-motion: reduceand fall back to a static first item. - Heading order. Article templates emit a single H1, then H2 sub-sections in source order — no skipped levels, no decorative H4s used for visual emphasis.
- Image alternatives. Cover images on every article use a descriptive alt text derived from the article topic + suburb. Inline images either have meaningful alts or are marked
alt=""(decorative-only). - Link text. Internal links use descriptive anchor text, not “click here” or “read more”.
Where we know we’re falling short
We are open about gaps so you can route around them and so we can fix them.
- Older legacy article templates. A subset of articles (largely those generated before the magazine-style redesign in March 2026) use a denser layout with smaller line-height. These will be migrated to the current template progressively.
- Some inline tables. A handful of suburb comparison tables exceed comfortable reading width on screens under 320 CSS pixels. We are working on horizontal-scroll wrappers with proper ARIA labelling.
- Third-party ad embeds. When advertising is enabled, ad embeds are loaded from Google AdSense and may not consistently meet our internal contrast and motion targets — that is outside our direct control. Ads are visually separated from editorial content with the
[Sponsored]label. - PDF documents. We avoid publishing PDFs as primary content. Where we do (e.g., methodology archives), the PDF source may not be tagged for assistive tech. Equivalent HTML versions are linked from the PDF page.
- Audio/video transcripts. We are a text-first publication. Where embedded video is used (rare), captions are required by our editorial standard but transcripts are not yet uniform across older posts.
Assistive technology we test against
We test critical templates against:
- NVDA (free Windows screen reader)
- VoiceOver (built into macOS and iOS)
- TalkBack (built into Android)
- Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice control (where available)
We test in the latest two stable versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Edge. Internet Explorer is unsupported.
Reporting a barrier
If you encounter an accessibility barrier — a feature you cannot use with assistive tech, a contrast problem, an unlabelled control, a keyboard trap — we want to know.
Email: [email protected] with subject line Accessibility.
We aim to:
- Acknowledge your report within two business days
- Provide a workaround or interim fix within ten business days
- Roll a permanent template-level fix into the next sprint where one is required
Please include the URL, the assistive tech you were using (and version), and what you were trying to do. If a barrier blocked you from completing a task, tell us what task — we will email you the answer directly while we fix the underlying page.
Independent audit
We have not yet commissioned a formal third-party WCAG conformance audit. This is on the roadmap for the second half of 2026. When it is complete, the report will be linked from this page.
Standards and references
- Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 — the spec we test against
- Australian Government Digital Service Standard, Criterion 9 — the public-sector accessibility benchmark we mirror
- WebAIM contrast checker — what we use for colour audits
Related
- Editorial Standards — how MELBZ reports
- Methodology — how we research and verify
- Corrections — factual error process
- Contact — full contact and complaints routing
Last reviewed: 2026-04-26. This page is reviewed quarterly.