Accessibility of Government Information – Article 9 In 2013, the New Zealand Government published its Web Accessibility Standard 1.0. The Standard took a phased approach to public sector organisations making their web pages and web applications accessible. The implementation schedule for the Standard stated that all externally-facing webpages must comply with the Standard by 1 July 2017 and that every webpage created, redesigned or redeveloped from 01 July 2014 must comply with the Standard: Assessment and reporting Organisations must be prepared, when notified, to assess and report within a reasonable timeframe on their conformance with the Standard. The assessment methodology and reporting mechanism will be communicated to organisations at the time of notification. In the case that an organisation does not fully meet the Standard, it will be required to manage any risk associated with that lack of conformance by performing a risk assessment and submitting a plan to address, over time, those areas of nonconformance.17 Disabled people and their organisations report that public sector organisations’ webpages are not fully compliant with the standard. In order to ascertain the level of compliance and action required to reach compliance two things are required: a.) Organisations need to be notified according to the Web Access Standard guidance and asked to report on compliance. b.) Organisations found not to be fully compliant need to carry out risk assessments and submit a plan to demonstrate how they will reach conformance. Back to top. Transport – Article 9 In 2017, the New Zealand Parliament passed the Land Transport Amendment Bill. This Bill explicitly sought to deregulate the small passenger services sector. Regarding taxis, the Bill removed the requirements for taxis to: display braille and large print signage (including the name and contact details of the taxi company and the unique taxi number) in the front of each taxi; the requirement for urban taxi drivers to have area knowledge; and, allowed taxi companies to operate less than 24-7. The latter issue has raised concerns from the disability community that this will lead to a reduction in the availability of wheelchair accessible taxis outside peak hours. The removal of the regulation not to mandate the displaying of braille and large print signage in taxis will mean that blind and vision impaired passengers will have no access to this information which raises issues for their safety. 17 Accessed 29 August 2017: https://webtoolkit.govt.nz/guidance/about-the-standards/about-the-webaccessibility-standard/#assessment-and-reporting Page 13