Sense HAT CGI script

I am trying to read various values from a Sense HAT by creating a CGI script that measures the values and returns them in the form of a JSON document.

This is the code running in the script.

#!/usr/bin/python3

# Script to read sensor data from the sense hat and return it as a JSON document

import sense_hat
import json
import cgitb

cgitb.enable()

# Set up sensehat.
sense = sense_hat.SenseHat()

# Calling these functions because the get functions will sometimes return zero when used for the first time.
sense._init_humidity()
sense._init_pressure()

# Set up json document
output = {
    "humidity": sense.get_humidity(),
    "pressure": sense.get_pressure(), 
    "temperature" : sense.get_temperature()
}

# Encode json to string and return to STDOUT
print("Content-Type: application/json\n")
print(json.dumps(output))

I have set up the apache2 webserver to accept .py files in the /var/www/cgi-bin folder. A simple hello world has verified that this is working.

When attempting to access the script through a browser, an Internal Server Error is reported. I've manually executed the script as www-data (the user that runs cgi-scripts) and I think that user doesn't have enough permissions to use the sense hat.

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./throw.py", line 12, in <module>
    sense = sense_hat.SenseHat()
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/sense_hat/sense_hat.py", line 92, in __init__
    self._stick = SenseStick()
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/sense_hat/stick.py", line 57, in __init__
    self._stick_file = io.open(self._stick_device(), 'rb', buffering=0)
PermissionError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/dev/input/event0'

How can I best go about this?