Accessibility — How MELBZ Supports All Readers

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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: reduce and 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.

WCAG on MELBZ

Accessibility — How MELBZ Supports All Readers

Our accessibility bar

What we test on every editorial template

Where we know we’re falling short