There is a strange irony sitting at the centre of the NDIS.
It is a scheme for people with disability, and yet a lot of it is genuinely hard for people with disability to use. The forms, the portal, the letters. Built as though the person reading them was not the whole point.
This is not me taking a cheap shot. The NDIA has said it itself. Its own accessibility policy says the NDIS website only “aims to meet” the recognised web accessibility standard, not that it fully meets it. And about its older participant portal, myplace, the Agency has said plainly that it “doesn’t meet accessibility standards,” and that participants told them it was hard to use.
Sit with that for a second. The digital front door to your own funding, on a system its own operator admits falls short.
It matters because of who is on the other side of that screen. As at March 2026 there were more than 770,000 active participants. Hundreds of thousands of them have disabilities, autism, intellectual disability, psychosocial disability, low vision, that make a cluttered, jargon-heavy portal not just annoying but a real wall. When you cannot read your own plan on screen, every question becomes a phone call, and often a call to someone you have to pay.
I want to be fair, the NDIA is not doing nothing here. The newer my NDIS portal, rolling out with PACE, is built to a better bar. It works at high zoom, plays nicely with screen readers like JAWS and NVDA, and the Agency publishes Easy Read guides, Auslan translations, even braille. You can ask for your plan in large print, audio or braille and they aim to get it to you within seven working days. That is real progress, and it deserves saying out loud.
But the Commission has said it still only “plans to” audit its own website against the current standard. So the bar is being lifted in places and still missing in others.
What I take from all of it is simple. Accessibility is not a nice extra you bolt on at the end. It is whether you can get through the front door of your own scheme at all. A tool for disabled people that disabled people cannot actually use is not a tool. It is one more wall.
So anything worth building in this space has to clear that bar first. Works with a screen reader. Plain language. Nothing that needs a decoder ring or a workshop to understand. It should show you what is in your plan and help you understand it, without deciding anything for you.
Where does the NDIS shut you out before you have even started?
References
- NDIS Accessibility policy (ndis.gov.au/policies/accessibility)
- NDIA “Building a new participant portal” (ndis.gov.au) — the myplace admission
- my NDIS Accessibility Statement
- NDIS Commission Accessibility page (ndiscommission.gov.au/accessibility)
- NDIA Actuary Quarterly Report, Q3 2025-26 — participant numbers by disability type
All sources current as of mid-2025 to August 2026.