A lot of businesses in Ontario know they need to think about accessibility. Far fewer know whether their website meets the requirements. And with the 31st December 2026 reporting deadline coming up for organisations with 20+ employees, it is worth finding out now rather than scrambling later.
AODA (Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act) compliance is not just about ticking a box. It is about making sure people can use your website, whether that is navigating by keyboard, using a screen reader or completing a form.
This does not mean creating a completely new website. Instead, it means making sure your current one meets AODA’s requirements.
The Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act is Ontario's law requiring businesses to remove barriers for people with disabilities, including on their websites. It applies to any organisation employing people in Ontario, and the obligations grow with the size of your business.
If you have 20 or more employees, you need to file an Accessibility Compliance Report by 31st December 2026. If you have 50 or more, your public website already needs to meet the WCAG 2.0 Level AA accessibility standard, a legal requirement that has been in place since January 2021.
The penalties can be steep with a maximum court ordered fine of $100,000 CAD per day for a corporation. Although, enforcement so far has leaned towards more modest fines, usually for missing deadlines. However, the bigger risk is not the fine, it is a website that turns away a meaningful part of your audience, every single day, while your compliance deadline gets harder to hit the longer it is left.
Roughly one in four Ontarians lives with a disability. If your website is not accessible, that is a large segment of your market that cannot use it properly.
A 2025 Semrush study of 10,000 websites found that more accessible sites ranked for 27% more organic keywords and saw a 23% lift in organic traffic, while over 70% of the sites studied still failed to meet basic accessibility standards. This is an opportunity for your business as most of your competitors have not fixed this yet. The same structure that helps a screen reader also helps AI tools like ChatGPT or Google's AI Overviews read and cite your site correctly.
The legal standard is WCAG 2.0 Level AA, but in plain terms, it comes down to making sure your website works properly for someone who cannot see a screen, use a mouse, or take in information the way most visitors do.
For a website, that means:
Images that make sense to a screen reader. An informative photo needs a description (alt text), while a purely decorative one should be silent rather than get read aloud as noise.
Full keyboard access. Every part of the site, menus, buttons, forms, needs to work by keyboard alone, for anyone who cannot or does not use a mouse.
Readable contrast. Text needs enough contrast against its background to be legible for someone with low vision.
Logical heading structure. Headings need to follow a sensible order, rather than being picked for how big or bold they look.
Clear forms. Labels and error messages need to be specific enough that a visitor knows exactly what is being asked of them, and what has gone wrong.
None of this requires rebuilding your website from scratch. It requires knowing where the gaps are on the site you already have, and fixing them properly.
We pair automated scanning with hands-on manual testing, using NVDA, one of the most widely used screen readers, so we can experience your site the way a visually or motor-impaired visitor would. Automated tools alone are a useful starting point, but they miss problems just as often as they flag things that were never broken.
From there, our approach typically covers a few clear stages:
Scan the site to understand where the issues actually are
Propose a plan for fixing them
Implement the fixes, in the code and in the content
Present what has changed and why
Train your team so new content stays compliant
Review performance after the fact
We recently took one of the world's largest news agencies, through full AODA compliance across a website publishing constantly, in multiple languages, to a global audience. At their scale, that meant meeting WCAG 2.0 Level AA across the entire site.
We used our approach for their website. In practice, this meant rebuilding keyboard navigation and correcting the underlying code so screen readers announce menus and content properly. We also fixed how images are handled, so decorative ones stay silent for screen readers while informative ones carry descriptions, building that logic into the CMS theme itself so it happens automatically every time a content editor publishes. The full remediation, over 100 hours of work, was completed in three weeks, with no disruption to a live, high-traffic site.