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NZ government agency web site Standards

The following defines the key terms within standards and recommendations:

Standard
Requirements of an agency that can be objectively tested and with which agencies Must comply.
It is anticipated that there are no exceptions for agency compliance with these standards.
Agencies' web sites will be checked against these standards when audits for compliance are undertaken. It is the responsibility of each agency to address and bring into compliance any non-compliant standards found during the audit.
Recommendation
Recommendations are items considered of high importance that:
  • would otherwise be a standard but cannot fairly be mandated as such for one or more reasons, principally being too wide in scope or containing a degree of subjectivity, or
  • are considered not quite as critical or appropriate to mandate absolutely as a standard.

Agencies are however expected to comply with recommendation items.

Agencies' web sites will be checked against these items when audits for compliance are undertaken. Where an agency is found not to be compliant with any such items, the agency will be required to provide a good reason for non-compliance.

Good practice
To simplify the Standards and Recommendations, examples of good practice have been collated separately at General Resources.
This section includes examples of good practice from organisations that have complied successfully with a particular standard, and/or examples of how they approached a particular problem.
The section also includes supporting documents, and links to other web sites that have information relevant to a particular standard or recommended item.

NZ government agency web site Standards and Recommendations

The following standards and recommended items (recommendations) are a combination of

  • Those devised specifically for NZ government web sites and
  • Accessibility standards derived from the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) standards checklist. In many cases, they have been re-worded and/or further qualified for NZ Government agency web site requirements. Each standard has the founding WAI standard(s) in the associated guide to the standard.

All standards and recommendations are intended to enhance accessibility and usability of agency web sites.

You may want to refer to the W3C WAI standards.

Version 1.0 standards and recommendations are based on the W3C WAI 1.0 recommendations. WCAG 1.0 was approved in May 1999 and is the stable version able to be referenced. WCAG 2.0 documents are still being developed. They are documented in Requirements for WCAG 2.0.

Refer to:

The NZ government agency web site Standards are:

The NZ government agency web site Recommendations are: