43% of NDIS Participants Have Autism. Is Your Website Built for Them?

What’s the problem?

Autism is the most common primary diagnosis for NDIS participants. As of December 2025 there are at least 320,000 participants with a primary diagnosis of Autism. When taken as a percentage of the 750,000+ total participants enrolled, NDIS official figures state 43% of all participants have Autism as a primary disability.

Yet, autism is rarely accommodated for in the design and development of many NDIS providers’ official websites, marketing materials, and process documents.

Over 95% of websites have critical accessibility errors that impact more commonly thought of assistive technology groups: screen reader users, voice control users, magnification users and users toggling colour contrast settings. It is likely that neurodivergence and cognitive disabilities are even less supported.

Picture this: a 24-year-old, recently diagnosed, trying to work out whether your service takes adult clients on the spectrum. It is 10pm, just late enough that the sensory load of the day has finally cleared, leaving just enough quiet to think. She opens your homepage. The carousel cycles every three seconds, throwing different smiling faces at her. The eligibility info is buried three clicks deep, inside a PDF, behind a glossary of terms she has never heard before.

By the time she finds the "Refer a Participant" button (which, on the previous page, was called "New Enquiries") she has closed the tab.

Tomorrow, she will try the next provider.

She is not a difficult customer.

She is the 43%.

What can we do about it?

There are three simple checks you can run today on your own website to maximise ease for an autistic person. Combined, they take less than thirty minutes, cost nothing, and will likely change what you thought you knew about how important it is to have an easy-to-use website.

1. The Plain-English Test

Open your homepage. Copy any block of text (your "About Us" paragraph is a good place to start) into a free readability checker such as Hemingway Editor.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) recommend that public-facing content should not require a reading ability greater than the lower secondary education level, that’s roughly Grade 8 in Australian schools. In our experience auditing NDIS providers, most homepages score Grade 12, university, or above.

This is not about dumbing things down. It is about removing unnecessary friction for people who may be encountering NDIS terminology for the first time, sometimes in a state of distress, fatigue or sensory overload. Phrases like "capacity building supports," "core support categories," and "psychosocial recovery coaching" are technically correct and almost universally unhelpful as a first impression.

A quick rewrite test: read a sentence aloud. If you would never say it that way at the kitchen table, change it.

2. The Senses Test

Just sit with your homepage open for sixty seconds without touching your mouse or keyboard. Count every element that moves on its own:

1. Auto-playing videos.
2. Image carousels.
3. Parallax scrolling backgrounds.
4. Animated icons.
5. Looping background patterns.
6. Cookie banners that slide in eight seconds late.
7. Pop-ups that ask for newsletter signups before the visitor has read a single sentence.

For an autistic visitor, particularly one with sensory sensitivity or co-occurring ADHD, each of these is a tax on cognitive energy. This energy should be spent reading your service offering.

The numbers are getting worse, not better. The 2026 WebAIM Million report found that the average homepage now contains 1,437 elements (a 22.5% increase in a single year) and 95.9% of homepages still fail WCAG conformance. More elements, more motion, more chances to lose someone before they reach your phone number.

The fix is rarely deletion and at Clear Access we pride ourselves in figuring out how to make something accessible, instead of just saying no. Consider how you can give control back to the user:

1. A pause button on the carousel.
2. A "reduce motion" toggle.
3. Respect settings for those that have already opted out of motion at the device level.
4. Present Newsletter Subscribe pop-ups only at appropriate moments

3. The Predictability Test

Open three pages of your website in three browser tabs:

1. Your homepage
2. A service detail page
3. Your contact page.

Now answer four questions:

1. Does the main navigation menu show the same items, in the same order, on every page?
2. Is your most important call-to-action (Book a Consultation, Refer a Participant, Become a Client) in the same place every time, with appropriate language, the same colour and the same shape?
3. If you replaced your logo with a blank square, would each page still feel like it belongs to the same organisation?
4. If a visitor returns next week, will the page they remembered still be where they left it?

Predictability is one of the most under appreciated forms of accessibility.

Many autistic users build a mental map of how a website works on their first visit, then return expecting that map to still be accurate. Inconsistent labels, shifting button positions, or pages that look like they belong to a different brand force the user to rebuild that map from scratch, and many will not.

Why these three checks matter more than ever

The accessibility business case for NDIS providers is unusually strong, and yet, even more unusually, it is rarely made. So, here we go:

Your audience is not optional.

Autism is the largest single primary disability category in the Scheme. If your provider serves any participant cohort, a meaningful slice of them will be neurodivergent. (As could their parents, partners, plan managers and support coordinators making decisions on their behalf)

The competition is failing.

With 95.9% of websites failing basic WCAG conformance and most NDIS providers having never commissioned an accessibility audit, accessibility is one of the few areas where a modest investment meaningfully differentiates you from peers. It is also a soft signal of professional rigour to the NDIA, plan managers, and support coordinators choosing where to refer.

The legal landscape is tightening.

(Legal jargon incoming, you have been warned.) Under the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (Cth), it is unlawful to discriminate against a person on the grounds of disability when providing goods, services or facilities — and digital services are explicitly included. Australia's procurement standard, AS EN 301 549, requires WCAG 2.2 Level AA conformance for ICT products and services. AHRC complaints, reputational pressure and procurement de-listings are all trending upward.

Inaccessibility is silent churn.

You will never see the analytics for the participants who closed your tab. They will not fill in your "what could we do better" form. They will simply choose someone else, and your web provider will quietly conclude that "the market is competitive."

Your next step: a free 30-minute Accessibility Review

Have you run the three checks and you are not quite sure what you are looking at?

Clear Access is a disability-led accessibility firm built specifically for NDIS providers. We navigate access barriers ourselves, every day. That means we audit your website against WCAG 2.2 AA and against a perspective the standard alone cannot capture. The two are not the same thing, and that is the gap most providers do not realise they have.

Book a free 30-minute Accessibility Review with Clear Access

In thirty minutes, we will walk through your homepage live, identify the three highest-impact fixes for your autistic and neurodivergent visitors, and send you a written summary you can hand straight to your developer or marketing team. No sales pressure. No jargon. No automated PDF just dumped in your inbox with no explanation.

The 43% are already trying to use your website. The only question is whether they can.