CWAC monitoring programme

How the Government Chief Digital Officer (GCDO) is using the Centralised Web Accessibility Checker (CWAC) to measure and inform web accessibility efforts.

Using CWAC to test websites

The GCDO is using the Centralised Web Accessibility Checker (CWAC — pronounced ‘quack’) to test for accessibility errors on the publicly facing government websites of:

  • agencies mandated to meet the NZ Government Web Standards — public service departments, NZ Defence Force, NZ Police and the Parliamentary Counsel Office
  • other agencies who have agreed to participate.

Centralised Web Accessibility Checker (CWAC)

In addition to raising the profile of accessibility within government agencies, the monitoring programme will:

  • help create a system-level overview of automatically detectable accessibility errors across government websites
  • provide actionable insights for agencies on how to improve the accessibility of their websites.

Quarterly scans

At the end of every quarter, starting , CWAC will scan up to 100 pages from each participating agency’s publicly facing websites.

CWAC crawls each website, much like Google, randomly selecting the pages to test. Every time a website is scanned, CWAC is likely to test a number of different pages from that site.

As it scans, CWAC stores the accessibility data for each web page in CSV files.

Publishing the results and agency leaderboards

Results on Data.govt.nz

Following each quarterly scan, the raw results are published on Data.govt.nz.

CWAC results — Data.govt.nz

The data that CWAC produces is not private. CWAC only reads publicly available web pages. The results it creates can be reproduced by anyone who:

  • uses the same free and open-source components that CWAC does
  • downloads and uses CWAC from GitHub
  • uses free and readily available browser plugins that do the same thing.

Openly publishing the CWAC results to Data.govt.nz:

  • contributes to the government’s obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) to monitor and report on the implementation of minimum accessibility standards — this helps ensure New Zealand remains accountable and continues to improve the lives of disabled people
  • demonstrates a commitment to open data and transparent government
  • saves time answering Official Information Act requests on CWAC data.

Leaderboards on Digital.govt.nz

Following the

An agency leaderboard will list each participating agency alongside its CWAC score.

Contact the team

If you have any questions related to CWAC or the Web Accessibility Standard, email web.standards@dia.govt.nz.

Utility links and page information

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