The new standards: how they fit together

Index

The new New Zealand Government Web Standards 2.0 (NZGWS 2.0) don’t differ significantly from their predecessors, but still offer more flexibility in web development. The main changes from version 1.0 are outlined below.

The standards are grouped in four sections

These are Strategy and operations, Technical, Content and design, and Legal and policy.

Conceptually, it’s useful to divide the standards into the technical and the non-technical, as below.

Technical standards: directly from the W3C

The Technical standards now comprise:

the W3C’s WCAG2.0 (level AA) standards, and
a few standards specific to New Zealand, called the "New Zealand-specific requirements" (or the "New Zealand layer" for short).

The New Zealand layer is not separate to WCAG2.0, but rather modifies it for use in our government environment, as recommended by the W3C.

WCAG2.0 is principles based and represents a move away from "checkpoint accessibility". Approaching accessible web development in this way is less prescriptive and far more flexible, something that is vital in the fast-changing web.

Note that sites that meet the version 1.0 technical standards will also meet the new standards in most areas (in fact, the new standards are easier in many cases). The only exceptions are the new multimedia standards (see our Web guide), which raise the bar higher.

For more detail about how the Technical standards work, see Overview of the technical standards (Web guide).

Non-technical standards: refreshed and updated

The main changes in the non-technical standards are in the "About this site" part of Required pages or sections and their content standard (more required links), the Privacy statement standard and the new Terms of use standard.

Strategy and operations

Standards:

No real change, apart from "Web strategy", which is less prescriptive than its version 1.0 counterpart.

Legal and policy

Standards:

The Copyright, Privacy and other standards in the Legal and policy section have been updated. In most cases this will just require a cut and paste from our templates and examples (found in our guides section) into your existing pages. You should also discuss the changes with your legal team.

There is one new requirement: Terms of use are required for interactive websites (wikis, blogs with comments enabled, etc) and websites that use the Government Logon Service. In most cases, agencies will already be meeting this new standard.

Content and design

Standards:

There’s no change to the first two standards, except that Linking to non-HTML files no longer requires the inclusion of "version" information in links.

There are a few minor changes to Required pages or sections and their content.

An agency's About this site page should now contain more links to other site pages. The About this site page is intended as a one-stop resource for all website and agency information, such as contacts, privacy details, etc. The standard provides templates and examples.
The requirement to provide media releases and other public information now applies only to "main" or corporate sites.
Site owner is clearly identified: Apart from identifying site ownership, an agency’s "main" or corporate site must link to other sites the agency owns, administers, or hosts, including co-owned sites.

The use of PDF and other non-HTML formats is handled in the New Zealand part of the Technical standards (HTML alternatives are still required).

More guidance

To better support quality government web development, the standards are supported by a growing suite of Web guides and links to useful resources.