Website Accessibility and Canadian Law: What Business Owners Need to Know

The short answer

If you run a business or organization in Canada, there is a good chance at least one legal framework expects your website to be usable by people with disabilities. Which one, and how specifically, depends on four things:

1. Your sector, and in particular whether you are federally regulated.
2. Where you operate, since several provinces have their own accessibility legislation.
3. Your size and status, because some requirements apply only to larger organizations or to public bodies.
4. Who you sell to and who funds you, because contracts, grants and customers in other jurisdictions can bring their own rules.

This article sets out those layers in plain language so you can have an informed conversation with your lawyer and your web team. It is not legal advice, and the landscape is still changing, so check the current position for your organization before relying on any of it. If you already know your obligations and want to know how to plan the work, the companion piece on practical website accessibility planning picks up from here.

Human rights law applies to almost everyone

Every province and territory has human rights legislation, and so does the federal government. In broad terms, these laws prohibit discrimination on the basis of disability in the provision of services to the public, and they carry a duty to accommodate people with disabilities, short of undue hardship.

None of these codes was written with websites in mind, and most do not mention them. But as more services move online (booking, applying, paying, getting information), an inaccessible website can become the barrier a complaint is about. A person who cannot complete a booking with a screen reader, or cannot read a scanned PDF form, is being denied a service in the same way as someone who cannot get through a door.

Governments are also bound by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In the Jodhan case, a blind woman challenged the accessibility of federal government websites, and the courts found that the government had failed to meet its equality obligations. That case concerned government, not private business, but it is a clear sign of how Canadian courts view online access to services.

The practical point: even in a province without specific accessibility legislation, an inaccessible website can expose an organization to a human rights complaint. It is not a hypothetical risk reserved for large companies.

The Accessible Canada Act

The Accessible Canada Act is federal legislation aimed at a barrier-free Canada. It applies to the federal government and to federally regulated organizations: sectors such as banking, telecommunications, broadcasting and interprovincial transportation, along with Crown corporations and federal departments.

Rather than prescribing a single web standard in the Act itself, it requires regulated organizations to:

• Prepare and publish accessibility plans that address barriers in areas including information and communication technologies.
• Set up a feedback process so the public can report barriers.
• Publish regular progress reports.

Accessibility Standards Canada develops standards under the Act, including standards relating to information and communication technology, and there is a commissioner responsible for compliance and enforcement. If you are a federally regulated organization, your website, apps and digital documents fall squarely within scope. If you are a supplier to one, expect accessibility requirements to show up in procurement.

Provincial accessibility laws

Several provinces have passed their own accessibility legislation. They differ considerably in how specific they are about websites and in how far their standards have been developed.

Ontario

The Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) is the longest established and the most specific about the web. Its information and communications standard requires public sector organizations and larger private and non-profit organizations to make their websites and web content conform to WCAG 2.0 at level AA, with some exceptions. Organizations outside Ontario that provide goods or services there and have employees in the province should check whether it applies to them.

Atlantic Canada

Nova Scotia’s Accessibility Act set a goal of an accessible province by 2030, with standards developed and phased in over time across areas that include information and communication. Newfoundland and Labrador has also passed an Accessibility Act, with standards and regulations being developed under it. New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island have been working on their own approaches, and their status has been changing, so confirm the current position with the province before you plan around it.

Elsewhere

Manitoba and British Columbia have accessibility legislation with standards that continue to develop. Quebec has accessibility requirements for public bodies’ websites. In every province, human rights legislation sits underneath.

The pattern across the country is clear even where the details are not: requirements are spreading, becoming more specific and increasingly referring to recognized technical standards. A website you build now will probably be judged against stricter expectations within its lifetime.

Contracts, funding and customers elsewhere

For many organizations, the most concrete accessibility requirement does not come from a statute at all.

• Public procurement. Municipalities, provincial bodies, health authorities and universities increasingly write accessibility standards into website and software RFPs. If you bid on public work, or build for those who do, expect a named standard in the contract. The piece on the municipal website RFP mistake shows how this appears in practice.
• Funding agreements. Grants and contribution agreements can require accessible communications as a condition.
• Customers in other countries. In the United States, accessibility lawsuits against businesses with inaccessible websites are common, and a Canadian business selling there can be affected. The European Union’s accessibility rules also reach certain products and services sold into EU markets.
• Corporate customers. Larger organizations often require suppliers to meet their own accessibility policies, especially for software and customer-facing tools.

Public bodies have a parallel set of language obligations for digital content, covered in bilingual by default. Accessibility and official languages often land on the same project, and they are easier to plan together.

The standard most frameworks point to

Most Canadian accessibility laws, policies and contracts refer, directly or indirectly, to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), published by the W3C. WCAG is organized around four principles (content must be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust) and three conformance levels, A, AA and AAA.

• Level AA is the level most Canadian requirements and procurement documents ask for, and the sensible default for most organizations.
• Versions matter. WCAG 2.0, 2.1 and 2.2 each added criteria, and newer versions are designed to be backward compatible. A law may name an older version while a contract or policy names a newer one. Building to the current version generally satisfies earlier ones.
• Some federal and procurement requirements reference broader ICT standards that incorporate WCAG for web content and add requirements for software, documents and hardware.

Whatever applies to you, write the specific version and level into your website brief and contract. The guide to writing a website RFP that produces better proposals covers how to phrase it so bidders price it properly.

Assessing your own exposure

A short set of questions to take to your lawyer, and to answer internally:

• Are we federally regulated, a public body, or funded by government?
• In which provinces do we provide goods or services, and do we have employees there?
• Do any of our contracts, grants or major customers specify an accessibility standard?
• Do we sell to customers in the United States or Europe?
• Which services on our website would be hardest to access another way (booking, applications, payments, account access)?
• Do we have a way for people to report a barrier, and does anyone respond?

The last two questions matter even if the answer to the first four is “no.” Human rights exposure depends less on your category than on whether someone is actually prevented from using your service.

What compliance does not look like

Two shortcuts are worth naming because they are sold aggressively.

Overlay widgets promise compliance by adding a script and a toolbar to your site. They do not fix the underlying code, documents or third-party tools, and many disabled users and accessibility practitioners regard them as an obstacle rather than a solution. They should not be treated as a legal defence.

One-time certificates describe a site on the day it was tested. Every new page, PDF, video and plugin can introduce new barriers. Compliance is an ongoing habit with an owner, not a badge.

What does help: building to a named standard from the start of a redesign, testing with real assistive technology, training the people who publish content, publishing an accessibility statement with a contact route, and reviewing on a schedule. That is how we treat accessibility on website design and development projects, because it is far cheaper to build in than to retrofit after a complaint.