ACT Government's Duplicate Image Problem: What Happened This Week

The ACT Government's Digital Solutions division flagged this week that a significant number of duplicate images have been identified across agency websites managed through the whole-of-government content platform, prompting an accelerated audit process that is expected to run through July and into August 2026. The issue — long considered a minor housekeeping matter — has been elevated after a review found it was inflating page-load times and creating accessibility compliance risks under the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2 standard.

The timing matters. The ACT Government committed in its 2025-26 Budget to a digital accessibility uplift program worth roughly $4.2 million over two years, with public-facing sites for Transport Canberra, Access Canberra and the Canberra Health Services among the priority platforms. Duplicate images that carry inconsistent or missing alt-text descriptions directly undermine that investment, because screen-reader software used by people with vision impairment can be confused or slowed by redundant file entries pointing to the same visual content with different metadata.

Where the Problem Is Showing Up

The Access Canberra service portal — which handles everything from vehicle registration to planning approvals — has been identified internally as one of the more affected platforms. Staff at the Dickson and Tuggeranong walk-in centres have reported that customers occasionally encounter broken or slow-loading image assets when completing online forms on their phones while queuing, suggesting the backend duplication has a real-world friction cost. The Transport Canberra website, which serves light rail and bus network information for hundreds of thousands of weekly users across suburbs like Gungahlin and Belconnen, has also been drawn into the audit scope.

The Australian National University's digital governance team, which manages web infrastructure for roughly 60 faculty and research unit sites, separately identified a parallel problem earlier this year after migrating to a new content management system. ANU's IT services group moved approximately 14,000 image files during that migration, and an internal check in May found that around 2,200 of those files were duplicates — some appearing as many as four times under different filenames. The University of Canberra, based in Bruce, has also been working through a comparable content audit since March as part of its broader website redevelopment project.

What the Fix Actually Involves

Resolving duplicate image libraries is not simply a matter of deleting files. Agencies must first map which pages reference each duplicate, redirect any hardcoded image URLs, and ensure that canonical versions carry the correct metadata before the redundant copies are retired. For large government platforms with thousands of pages — some of which have not been substantively edited since 2019 or earlier — that process is labour-intensive and requires coordination between web teams and the program areas that originally published the content.

The ACT Government's Digital Solutions group has been running training sessions at its offices in Canberra City to help agency communications staff use automated detection tools that flag duplicate files within a content management system. A further session is scheduled for late July. The tools can reduce manual checking time significantly, though they still require human review before any file is permanently removed — a safeguard that prevents accidental deletion of images used in archived ministerial statements or official reports.

For Canberrans interacting with government digital services, the most practical upshot is that the audit period may involve brief instances of missing or placeholder images on some agency pages as corrections are applied. Access Canberra has advised that transactional services — payments, renewals, application submissions — will not be interrupted during the process. Anyone encountering a broken image on an ACT Government page is encouraged to use the feedback function built into most agency sites, or to contact Access Canberra directly on 13 22 81, which helps the digital team prioritise which pages need urgent attention first.