‘The new accessibility panic’: Remaining challenges to the achievement of Australia’s National Transition Strategy

The Australian Government made a commitment in 2010 toensure that all Federal, State and Territory websites would beaccessible and meet World Wide Web (W3C) Web ContentAccessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) Level AA conformance[1]through its National Transition Strategy (NTS) by the end of2014 [2]. However, as Wood and Hollier [3] foreshadowed in2013, the recently released NTS 2012 Progress Report confirmsthat the targets for the first stage of the NTS implementationplan(Level A conformance by the end of 2012) proved unrealistic [4].Moreover, the Chief Information Officer with the AustralianGovernment Information Management Office (AGIMO), GlenArcher, acknowledges it is unlikely that the targets set for thefinal stage of the implementation plan (Level AA conformance)will be met by the end of 2014 [5]. This paper reports the findingsfrom content analysis of postings to AGIMO blogs, and ourreflections on the discussions of students enrolled in an onlineProfessional Certificate in Web Accessibility Compliance course,to identify key factors that have contributed to the challengesexperienced by government departments in achieving NTStargets. The final section of the paper explores the implicationsand proposes strategies that could assist in addressing theidentified barriers.