The Story of New Zealand's Internet

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Geoff Munn – Developer Manager, SilverStripe

“The Web Standards are New Zealand’s own government issued set of guidelines around how government agencies are supposed to present information to the New Zealand public. Because one of their goals is to make the Internet the primary form of communication with the New Zealand public and to do that, they need to ensure that government agencies don’t disenfranchise any sector of the population because they’ve got disabilities or are running an older computer for instance. So the government set these up and I came across those in the early 2000s and have assisted them in revising the guidelines over the years to make them as relevant as possible.

I wrote a validator against New Zealand Web Standards when I found that a lot of the reports that were being presented to government agencies around web accessibility were extremely difficult to read and they were frequently just passed off to the developers to do something about. So I decided to make one that was a bit more user-friendly for the people that had to read it and presented as much information as it could on an automated basis. It made the complete simple – which was the tagline that won the TUANZ award in 2008.”