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• New Zealand Government Web Standards 1.0

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Technical

Index

• Overview
• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0
  • 1. WCAG2.0 conformance level
  • 2. New Zealand-specific requirements
    • Technologies and techniques which must be used
    • Technologies which may be used but not relied on
    • Technologies and techniques which must not be used
    • Browser testing standard

Overview

The W3C's WCAG2.0 standards (level AA) have been adopted as the New Zealand Government's technical standards. These include New Zealand-specific standards, as described below.

• WCAG2.0 Overview (W3C)
• Brief checklist: WebAim's summary checklist for implementing WCAG2.0 (AA)
• Links to official W3C material and other resources: Technical web guides

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0

Websites must meet WCAG2.0's five conformance requirements.

Note that two of these, "1. Conformance Level" and "4. Only Accessibility-Supported Ways of Using Technologies", have been pre-set for agencies in the following points (the latter being re-named below as the "New Zealand-specific requirements").

1. WCAG2.0 conformance level

Agency sites must meet all WCAG2.0 success criteria, level AA (including level A).

2. New Zealand-specific requirements

The following requirements adjust WCAG2.0 for the New Zealand government and comprise the second part of the Technical standards. They equate to the "Only Accessibility-Supported Ways of Using Technologies" conformance requirements in WCAG2.0.

2.1 Technologies and techniques which must be used

• UTF-8 character encoding must be used. This is to help ensure consistency of data across government and to best enable multilingual support.
• Validation. All pages must validate to a published grammar.
• Language codes. Where English is the language of the page (WCAG2.0 3.1.1) or the language of part of the page (WCAG2.0 3.1.2), use the language code en-NZ. Where the language is Māori, use mi.  For other languages, see the updated list at the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.

2.2 Technologies which may be used but not relied on

• Scripts, applets and other programmatic objects. Information or services in webpages or applications must be available without scripts, applets and other programmatic objects. This includes Flash, Silverlight, Java and Javascript. See the guide to Applications and accessible alternatives.
• Do not provide content in document formats other than HTML (such as PDF, RTF, Word, Flash, etc) except when:
  • content is already provided in HTML format, or
  • content originates in software formats for which there are no accessible alternatives (eg, CAD, some financial and economic modelling tools), in which case you must provide a summary, file format and file size and a method by which the user can contact your agency for assistance in accessing the content, or
  • content was created before 31 October 2009, in which case you must provide a summary, file format and file size and a method by which the user can contact your agency for assistance in accessing the content.
• Stylesheets. Sites must work properly (be navigable, present information intelligibly) with stylesheets disabled. 

2.3 Technologies and techniques which must not be used

• The Frameset doctype must not be used.
• Underlining must not be used for headings or non-link text.
• Mark-up redirects must not be used to mark-up (META or scripting) to automatically redirect pages. Instead, configure the server to perform redirects.
• Server-side image maps must not be used.

2.4 Browser testing standard

All new or significantly redeveloped websites must be tested against all browser and operating system combinations identified as A grade by Yahoo! Graded Browser Support.

Agencies must also test against at least one browser not graded A, on a platform of their choice. Agencies might choose a non-A grade browser by considering their website statistics.