Accessibility is one of those words that arrives in a sales email attached to a quote. An agency runs your site through a checker, sends you a screenshot full of red, and offers to fix it for a fee that would make your eyes water. Somewhere in there is a real obligation and a genuinely good idea - but it is wrapped in enough fear and upselling that most firms either panic or ignore it. Here is what accessibility actually means for a New Zealand financial services site, and what a sensible response looks like.
Let me clear up the thing the sales emails are vague about: there is no single New Zealand statute that says a private firm's website must meet a particular accessibility standard. What there is, is the Human Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination in the provision of goods and services - and a website is increasingly how a service is provided. A site that a blind or low-vision person genuinely cannot use to contact you or read your information is, at minimum, a reputational and legal soft spot, even if no one has tested it in court for a small firm. Government agencies are required to meet the recognised standard; private firms are not compelled to, but that standard is still the sensible reference point.
That reference point is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, currently WCAG 2.1, at the AA level. You do not need to read them - they are written for developers - but it helps to know the name, because every quote and audit will cite it. The guidelines, published by the W3C's accessibility initiative, boil down to a few plain ideas: people should be able to perceive your content, operate your site, and understand it, whatever device or assistive technology they use. AA is the level the New Zealand government holds itself to, and it is the right target to aim at - the question is how far down that road a small firm needs to travel, and how much it should pay to get there.
It is easy to treat accessibility as an abstraction until you look at who your clients are. Financial firms skew towards an older clientele - people managing retirement, estates, mortgages - and older people are exactly the cohort with more low vision, less steady hands, and a greater reliance on larger text and keyboard navigation. Add everyone with a permanent disability, a temporary injury, or just a phone in bright sunlight, and the share of visitors who benefit from an accessible site is not a rounding error. These are people making consequential financial decisions. Making them squint at grey-on-grey text or fight an unlabelled form is a poor way to begin a trusted relationship.
Most of the accessibility that matters comes from a short list of unglamorous things, and a well-built site gets them mostly right without heroics. Sufficient colour contrast between text and background, so the fashionable light-grey-on-white that designers love does not become unreadable. Text that can be resized without the layout collapsing. A site you can navigate by keyboard alone, because not everyone uses a mouse. Alt text on images that convey information. Proper heading structure, so screen readers can move through the page in order. And link text that means something - 'read our fee guide' rather than 'click here'. None of this is exotic, and none of it requires a five-figure project.
If there is one place to concentrate, it is your forms - because forms are where the site stops being a brochure and starts being a service. An enquiry form with fields that are not properly labelled, error messages a screen reader cannot announce, or a CAPTCHA that defeats assistive technology, is a door shut in someone's face at the exact moment they were trying to become a client. This overlaps directly with plain conversion sense, since a form that is hard for anyone to use loses enquiries from everyone, as the contact form article covers. Fix the forms first and you have addressed both accessibility and the part of the site that actually earns its keep.
Now the part the sales emails would rather you did not hear. Two things get oversold here. The first is the accessibility overlay - a widget you bolt on that promises to make your site compliant automatically, usually for a monthly fee. The accessibility community is broadly scathing about these, because they paper over problems rather than fixing them and can actively interfere with the assistive technology real users rely on. The second is the full-AA audit-and-remediation project pitched to a tiny firm with a five-page brochure site, priced as though it were a government department. Genuine accessibility work is real and sometimes worth paying for - but a proportionate amount of it, matched to the size and risk of your actual site, not a compliance package sized for someone else's exposure.
The proportionate path is straightforward. Start with the free tools - a browser-based checker will surface contrast failures, missing alt text and unlabelled fields in a few minutes, and the New Zealand government's own guidance is plain-English and free. Fix the baseline issues, which on most firm sites is a half-day job for a competent developer, not a project. Make sure whoever maintains the site builds new pages accessibly from the start, which costs nothing once it is habit. And if you are a larger firm, or genuinely worried about exposure, then pay for a proper audit by someone who tests with real assistive technology - not a widget, and not a screenshot of red boxes attached to an invoice.
Accessibility is not a compliance box or an agency upsell. It is the unremarkable business of making sure the people who need your services can actually use your website - and a fair number of them need exactly the adjustments above. Get the baseline right, build new things with it in mind, and you have done the part that matters. The gold-plated audit can wait until someone can tell you, plainly, what problem it solves that the baseline did not.
