What the updated Australian accessibility rules mean for your documents
Most people who think about document accessibility think about websites. Colour contrast on a homepage. Alt text on images. Screen reader compatibility for a web application.
In April 2025, the Australian Human Rights Commission released updated guidance that made something explicit: accessibility obligations under the Disability Discrimination Act extend to emails, digital documents, and learning materials. The standard is WCAG 2.2 Level AA.
This is not a website conversation anymore.
What this means in practice
Around 5.5 million Australians, roughly 21.4% of the population, live with disability. The documents your organisation produces reach some of them. Under the updated guidance, producing documents that cannot be navigated by people using assistive technology can constitute discrimination under the DDA, and non-compliance can trigger complaints to the Australian Human Rights Commission and potential court proceedings.
That is worth sitting with for a moment, because the instinct when reading compliance updates is to file them away for later. This one has practical implications for document production happening right now, in Word and PowerPoint, by people who may not know the standards apply to them.
Why most document templates are not accessible
A document template built to look good is not the same as a document template built to work for everyone.
Take heading structure as an example. If a heading in a Word document was styled by selecting the text and manually changing the font size and weight, it looks like a heading. To a sighted user reading the document on screen, it functions like a heading. To a screen reader, it is just bold text in a larger font. It does not register as a navigational element. A person using a screen reader to move through the document cannot jump to that heading the way a sighted user can scroll to it.
The same principle applies to reading order in PowerPoint. The visual sequence of slides looks logical. The sequence in which screen readers encounter elements on each slide is determined by the order those elements were added to the slide, which may have nothing to do with the visual order. A title added after the body text, for layout reasons, will be read after the body text by a screen reader, even though it appears above it visually.
These are not obscure edge cases. They are the kinds of things that get built into templates during the design and build process, and then propagate into every document produced from that template, indefinitely.
What an accessible template actually looks like
The good news is that accessibility in a template does not require a different design. It requires building it in correctly from the start.
Heading styles are defined in the document style sheet at the correct hierarchy levels, so screen readers can navigate the document logically. Paragraph styles govern spacing and font choices consistently, so the reading order is reliable. Colour combinations are checked against WCAG 2.2 contrast requirements. Alt text placeholders are built into image frames so the person filling in the template is prompted to add descriptions. Reading order is set explicitly in PowerPoint rather than left to chance.
When these things are in the template, every document produced from it is accessible by default. The person filling it in does not need to know anything about WCAG standards. They just open the template and produce a document that works for everyone who receives it.
This is what we built for NSW Rural Fire Service. Their staff and volunteers, ranging from senior executives to people picking up the template for the first time, could produce WCAG-compliant documents without any training on accessibility. The compliance was built into the structure, and the structure did the work.
[Read More About Our Work With NSW Rural Fire Service]
If you are not sure whether your current templates produce accessible documents, we are happy to take a look. Send your existing templates through and we will assess them as part of a free pre-build review.
(Sources: Australian Human Rights Commission, Standards and Guidelines for Digital Accessibility (April 2025). Updated guidance on accessibility obligations under the Disability Discrimination Act 1992, extending requirements to emails, digital documents, and learning materials. humanrights.gov.au Australian Bureau of Statistics, Disability, Ageing and Carers, Australia (2022). Around 5.5 million Australians, roughly 21.4% of the population, live with disability. abs.gov.au W3C / Web Accessibility Initiative, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 (October 2023). The current international standard for digital accessibility, adopted as ISO/IEC 40500:2025. w3.org)