Should my website be accessible (WCAG)?

Australia has real precedent here. The best-known case involved a vision-impaired user who successfully complained that the Sydney Olympics website was inaccessible, missing text descriptions for images and unreadable results tables, under the Disability Discrimination Act. That case is over two decades old, but it established that websites can fall under discrimination law the same way a physical building can, and that principle hasn’t gone away.

This doesn’t mean every small business website needs to meet the full WCAG standard to the letter. It means accessibility is a genuine legal exposure, not just a nice-to-have, particularly for businesses that are larger, government-adjacent, or serve the public directly.

In practice, reasonable accessibility covers a manageable list: alt text on images so screen readers can describe them, enough colour contrast that text is actually readable, a site that works with keyboard navigation alone, and headings structured in a logical order rather than styled purely for size.

Most of this overlaps directly with good SEO practice – alt text and heading structure matter to search engines for the same reasons they matter to screen readers.

Getting the basics right isn’t a significant extra cost if it’s built in from the start. It becomes expensive only when it’s retrofitted after the fact, or ignored until a complaint forces the issue.

The practical approach: build with reasonable accessibility as a default, not as an afterthought bolted on if someone asks.

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