Accessible workplace, inaccessible workflows: mandatory documents, challenges and workarounds in accessible onboarding

This paper describes the accessibility challenges faced by the Centre For Accessibility Australia (CFAA), a small not-for-profit organisation when onboarding new staff. The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) requires that employers fill in a PDF document with tax file information for new employees, a process that is currently not accessible to screen-reader users. The director of the CFAA is legally blind and uses a range of assistive technologies to interact with the Web, documents and messaging platforms. This paper describes accessibility issues identified in the current ATO form and the range of alternative approaches the CFAA has had to adopt as work arounds to this inaccessible government document.