Everything You Need to Know About the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA)

The Disability Discrimination Act 1992 is Australia's federal anti-discrimination law. It makes it unlawful to discriminate against a person because of disability in areas including employment, education, accommodation and the provision of goods, services and facilities. An inaccessible website can fall under that last heading, which is why the Act is the reference point for digital accessibility in Australia.

The Act itself does not set out a technical standard. The Australian Human Rights Commission's World Wide Web Access advisory notes recommend WCAG 2.0 Level AA, and government agencies apply the same level: Commonwealth bodies worked to Level A by 2012 and Level AA by the end of 2014 under the National Transition Strategy, and states such as Queensland require the latest WCAG version at Levels A and AA. WCAG 2.0 AA is therefore the accepted benchmark, even though the Act does not spell it out.

Any organization that provides goods, services or facilities to the public — businesses, non-profits, banks, retailers, universities and government bodies. There is no size threshold, registration or filing: the duty applies from the moment your site is offered to the public, and public procurement rules and tender frameworks pass the same WCAG requirement into supplier contracts.

WCAG 2.0 is the standard named in Australian policy, while WCAG 2.2 is the version the W3C currently recommends and appears more often in new tender frameworks. Because every testable criterion in WCAG 2.0 also exists in WCAG 2.1 and 2.2, a site built to WCAG 2.2 AA also satisfies policies that reference 2.0 — so aiming at the newest level covers both.

Yes. In Maguire v Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (2000), the human rights commission found that an Olympics website people with disabilities could not use was unlawful discrimination, and that a complainant did not have to prove intent — only that the site did not work for them. Most later matters involving retail, financial services and government portals have been settled with undertakings to remediate.

Under the DDA, service providers are expected to make reasonable adjustments so a person with disability is not disadvantaged. For a website that can mean offering information in another accessible format, or removing a barrier someone reports. Adjustments that would impose unjustifiable hardship do not have to be made, but the burden of showing that hardship sits with the organization, not with the person asking.

Start with an automated scan of every page to surface missing text alternatives, low contrast, unlabeled form fields and keyboard traps, then confirm the results with a keyboard and a screen reader. Automated checks cover a large share of problems quickly but not all of them, and it is a barrier a real person hits — not a clean scan — that turns into a complaint.

allyWay scans your pages against WCAG success criteria, shows what fails and where, and automates fixes for a large share of common issues such as contrast, labels, keyboard and ARIA problems — where human judgment is needed, like writing alt text or captioning a video, someone still has to make the call. What you get is faster remediation, ongoing monitoring and a documented record of findings, not a legal guarantee: meeting the DDA stays your organization's responsibility.