Dear Arts Council of New Zealand Toi Aotearoa,

Are you able to supply your Risk Assessment and Management Plan in regards to meeting the current Web Accessibility & Usability Standards for creativenz.govt.nz and portal.creativenz.govt.nz.

Yours faithfully,

Nic Lane

Dear Pip O'Flaherty,

Thanks for acknowledging this request.

Yours sincerely,

Nic Lane

Kia Ora Pip & David,

My understanding from this reply is that your good reason for not supplying this request is because you haven’t developed such assessments and plans:

a. because you think creativenz.govt.nz conforms, and

b. because the Government’s Chief Digital Officer hasn’t notified you on the non-conformance of portal.creativenz.govt.nz.

The outdated 2001 Disability Act (which Creative NZ refers to in their current Diversity Policy 2015), states:

9.2 Provide opportunities for disabled people to create, perform and develop their own arts, and to access arts activities.

My understanding of this would imply autonomy, which isn’t present in the current design, notably not accommodating for NZSL as an official language, by currently having to enter text in the ‘What’, ‘How’, ‘Who’, & ‘How Much’ fields.

Potentially yes you have inclusive ways to counter not achieving a universal design, but maybe this could also be an indicator as to why no applications have been received in this language on the portal to date.

In regards to your Diversity Policy we see this as Creative New Zealand placing “significant barriers to accessing [y]our support and [y]our resources (this includes making sure [y]our own communications and application processes meet, as far as possible, agreed standards for removing barriers”.

This is but one example of something that could be seen as Significant (4) on a risk severity scale ( https://www.digital.govt.nz/standards-an... ) due to the barriers/discrimination placed against a particular community and their inability to have self-sovereignty.

I have reached out to Rachel but would recommend Creative New Zealand develops their own internal accessibility advisory group, conducts an audit on your peer-assessors to ensure fair representation, continues to reach out for support, and reviews your Diversity Policy to align it with the 2016 Disability Strategy and 2019 Disability Action Plan (that the Arts Council is not currently signed onto).

He waka eke noa,

Nic Lane