New Website Goes Live

By: Mike Peters

Disabled United: 01 June, 2025

The new Disabled United website is now live. It's home page layout is based on the RNZ homepage design.

The new homepage features significantly more content than the old website and will continue to improve rapidly over the coming weeks and months based on feedback from readers.

Purpose

The website has been designed to resolutely advocate for the dignity and rights of all people with disabilities, their families, and support workers. It will defend the funding of our support organisations. It's also intended to reach out to the rest of the population and win them to our common cause.

The first website was born on March 18 2024, and was used to organise the fight against the cuts. This website will expand its scope to encompass any injustice affecting and need expressed by people with disabilities in NZ.

All of the content from the old website will be moved here over time.

Volunteer created

Volunteers from our community have built the website by hand using standard layout templates and a lot of search and replace. Currently, all web pages are laid out using an outdated but fast and straightforward method: hidden nested tables. This has enabled a great deal of rapid experimentation to determine what would work. During this time the website was hidden from Google Search.

Today the website was unhidden from Google Search.

Next, the website will be automatically created by Pipi 9 CMS, a database-driven Content Management System, capable of publishing large websites using templates (another website has 90,000 pages) in the coming months.

All of the HTML code in these templates will then be converted to use CSS style sheets, which will make the website mobile-friendly (it's not yet). This will also enable the look of the website to be improved. Then, a significant effort will be made to make it work 100% with screen readers and meet the WAI-ARIA 1.2 and WCAG 2.2 standards for web accessibility.

One language per website

In a similar way to how Wikipedia is organised, this website is in only one language, English. Later, other versions of this website will be available in Māori and New Zealand Sign Language. Versions will also be made available for any other community upon request.

Having separate websites for each language simplifies the IT work required. This approach is widespread in Europe, which has 250 native languages, and many more languages spoken by migrants. There will be minimal use of JavaScript because all the pages are static. Most web pages will be approximately 1% the size of those on other websites with the same amount of words. These approaches are significantly more secure against hackers and crooks who prey on people with disabilities.

Login

Later, passwords will be issued, so readers can create a profile, subscribe to their choice of news, and submit more content.

Today, as a temporary measure, many pages have links to Google Forms for people to add missing information.

Thank you

All this will take time and involve open discussion by our community and extensive testing by individuals who want to contribute.

Thank you to everyone who has contributed with encouragement, comments, data, phone calls, feature requests, meetings, testing, code books, and other assistance.