Measures to support accessibility

Te Aka Whai Ora takes the following measures to ensure the accessibility of our website by:

  • including accessibility throughout our internal policies
  • assigning clear accessibility goals and responsibilities
  • employing formal accessibility quality assurance methods.

Te Aka Whai Ora – Māori Health Authority is committed to making our website accessible in accordance with the New Zealand Government Web Standards and Accessibility Charter.  This means that our website has been developed with a focus on accessibility for all users and the goal of achieving the Web Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 to Level AA compliance.

Accessibility testing process

https://www.teakawhaiora.nz was tested several times during development with our accessibility contractor, Access Advisors.

All testing is completed against WCAG 2.1 criteria and best practice. Access Advisors employ a selection of automated and manual testing tools. We plan to test the website regularly to monitor performance.

Compliance status

WCAG define 3 levels of compliance: Level A, Level AA, and Level AAA. These requirements are for designers, content writers, and developers, and are designed to improve accessibility for whānau with disabilities.

Currently, Te Aka Whai Ora is partially compliant with WCAG 2.1 level AA. Partially compliant means that while we meet most of the checkpoints, there are some parts of the content that do not fully conform to the accessibility standard.

Plans to improve

As part of our ongoing accessibility programme of work, we will continually check the website. We have a backlog list of known accessibility issues that we are working resolve.  As fixes are made, we will update this accessibility statement.

Additional considerations

File Formats

Where possible we have avoided the use of *.pdf files, but if we have used *.pdf files we have endeavoured to make them as accessible as possible. Where we can we have also provided alternative file formats.

Text to Speech

https://www.teakawhaiora.nz is a bilingual website, with a Te Reo Māori and English version. Users of the English language version can actively choose the depth of Te Reo Māori content as part of their experience.

It is important to note that the current text to speech technology does not always provide a quality te reo experience. This is because of the assistive technology and Te Aka Whai Ora has taken all steps it can to improve the screen reader experience. 

Feedback

We welcome your feedback on the accessibility of Te Aka Whai Ora.

Tell us if you find anything troublesome, discover an error, have issues with our content or have a suggestion on how we could improve on Te Aka Whai Ora by emailing us at info@teakawhaiora.nz.

We value your feedback and will be in touch to let you know what has happened. We try to be in touch in 2-4 days.

Formal complaints

If you would like to make a formal complaint about the accessibility standards on this website, email us at info@teakawhaiora.nz.

This statement was prepared on 16 November 2022.