The New Zealand Disability Strategy has several objectives which highlight the importance of accessible government.

Objective 1: Encourage and educate for a non-disabling society.
Objective 2: Ensure rights for disabled people.
Objective 4: Provide opportunities in employment and economic development for disabled people.
Objective 6: Foster an aware and responsive public service.
Objective 10: Collect and use relevant information about disabled people and disability issues.

Consistent with the New Zealand Disability Strategy, government agencies are expected to take a lead in making their information, services and workplaces responsive to disabled peoples’ needs and expectations. For this report, agencies have been asked to say what they are doing in the following four key areas:

• accessible information
• accessible services
• being a good employer
• accessible buildings.
• If disabled people can get information, use services, be employed on an equal basis and get in and around buildings easily, then government is considered to be accessible.

Issues with data reported in this section

 

All of the information reported in this section has been drawn from responses by agencies to questions asked by the Office for Disability Issues.

The template used for recording agency responses changes from year to year as new questions are added or the way questions are framed is altered to elicit better data.

The data is organised with a textual description of data and comparison with data from the previous year, 2006. Following that is a graphical representation of the data to give a picture of change occurring over the year from 2006 to 2007.

Where the graphs display no data for one year (normally 2006), this means the questions have been changed to collect more detailed information.

The number of agencies that provide plans also changes each year, so results record the percentage of agencies that report activity that has been achieved in a particular activity area. This means the results from different years can be compared, albeit roughly.

Where questions do not have a clear ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer, the result is considered to be achieved if agencies have made substantial progress in achieving the target (for example, most of the building sites are accessible and plan to continue working on this), or would be able to do it on request.

In some cases, a judgment call has been made as to whether an agency is considered to have achieved a particular target, based on the information provided.

While every effort has been made to produce quality and reliable data in the graphs, for full information on what an agency has reported, you should refer to the Office for Disability Issues website where agency plans / reports have been made available for public viewing.