Welcome to the new Amaze website

Amaze is proud to launch our new AA-accessible website, designed and developed in consultation with autistic people and their families.

The new Amaze website offers our 160,000 annual visitors a more engaging and accessible experience.

From the outset of this project, our team was dedicated to building a website that reflected the real experiences, needs and faces of our community. To make this happen, we undertook extensive consultation with community members, researched best practice digital design, and engaged the wealth of accessibility and autism expertise in Amaze. 

The new website looks beautiful, is simple to navigate and provides practical, accurate information for our diverse community at all stages of life. We hope you enjoy using it as much as we did building it.

What’s on the new site?

• You can now use the I am… drop-down at the top left of the main menu to quickly find information that is relevant to different circumstances.
• In Understand Autism, you’ll find contemporary, evidence-based autism information and advice.
• In Support, you can find out more about connecting with supports and services, read about the NDIS, and access helpful resources.
• The Training section showcases Amaze’s industry-leading professional development and consulting practices.
• Creating Change explores Amaze’s work in creating systemic change for autistic people – from policy submissions to our flagship Spectrospective campaign.
• You can read the latest news from Amaze, download our media guidelines for reporting on autism, and sign-up to eSpectrum under News and Events.
• Find out how you can help shape the future for autism with Amaze in the Get Involved.
• Find out all about Amaze, what we do and why we do it in About Amaze.
• And finally, if you can’t locate the information you’re looking for, the site has a great search function that can help you find your way around. Just click the magnifying glass icon at the top right of the website.

You can still contact our Autism Advisors through the website via web chat from 8am–7pm, Monday to Friday. Simply click on the icon on the bottom right of your screen to open a chat window.

We’re launching with a new look and lots of new information – but the journey isn’t over yet. In the coming months, we’ll be adding new resources, even more information, and highlighting the lived experiences of autistic people and their supporters. 

If you’d like some tips and hints for using the website, check out How to use this website.

What kind of consultation did Amaze do?

Autistic people and their supporters are at the centre of everything we do at Amaze, and the website redevelopment was no different.

In preparation, Amaze interviewed 12 autistic people, family members and professionals. The individuals were from different backgrounds and circumstances, so we could capture diverse experiences and challenges. These interviews helped us understand what was working on the current website, and what people wanted from a new one.

In these interviews, it was clear that people liked and valued the information on the Amaze website, but found it very hard to find the pages they wanted. We also got feedback that the website featured lots of information for parents of young children – but not enough for teenagers and adults.

Using this information, and data collected over the previous three years, we moved onto creating the ‘sitemap’. This is a list of pages that will be on the website, showing the order in which they’ll appear. While the Amaze team was working on this, our agency partner began creating the autism-friendly designs for the site.

The sitemap and designs were workshopped with a group of 14 autistic people, parents and carers of autistic people, health professionals and educators. We sought feedback on elements like the language used, visual style (such as colour and photography), and the design of the menus.

The invaluable feedback provided enabled Amaze create a website that is easy to understand and navigate, uses respectful and identity-first language, and provides information to support the diverse autism community. We thank each of these individuals for their generosity and insight. 

Our commitment to continuous improvement

The new website conforms to the AA standards of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, but there is more work to do. The Amaze team will continue to improve the accessibility of the website’s design, content and functionality.

To support our users, we’ll also continue to add tips and advice on the How to Use this Website page.

We welcome feedback about your experiences with the Amaze website, so we can continue to build a better website for our community. If you would like to share your thoughts or suggestions, please email [email protected] or call 1300 308 699.