Accessibility Rules for Businesses Selling in Ontario

An email about Ontario

A BC business that sells across the country receives an email from a company offering accessibility audits. Every business selling into Ontario, it says, must make its website accessible by 2021 or face penalties.

Ontario does have a website accessibility rule, and it does have that date. But the email gets the most important part wrong.

The rule follows where your employees are, not where your customers are. A business with no staff in Ontario is outside it, however much it sells there.

What follows is general information about a law, not legal advice. If the answer for your business is close, a lawyer should confirm it.

What the Ontario rule requires

The Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act sets standards through a regulation, one part of which covers websites.

Businesses and non-profits with fifty or more employees in Ontario must make their public websites and web content meet WCAG 2.0, the international web accessibility guidelines, at Level AA by January 1, 2021.

Two criteria are excepted: captions for live video and audio description for pre-recorded video. And since January 1, 2014, new or significantly refreshed sites from these organisations have had to meet Level A.

The rule covers content the organisation controls directly or through a contract that allows changes, and it allows exceptions where meeting it is not practicable.

Who is covered

• Fifty or more employees in Ontario: the website rule applies.
• One to forty-nine in Ontario: other duties apply, but not the website rule.
• No employees in Ontario: the regulation does not apply at all.
• Customers in Ontario: not, on their own, a reason it applies.
• Staff in BC do not count towards the fifty.

The fourth is the one sales emails get wrong. Shipping orders to Toronto, taking bookings from Ottawa or selling through dealers in Ontario does not bring a business under the rule; employing people there does.

How the count works

Count the people employed in Ontario. Part-time, seasonal and contract employees count; volunteers and independent contractors do not, and nor does anybody working in another province.

A BC company with a sixty-person warehouse in Ontario is covered, even if its head office and most of its staff are in BC.

And because the rule applies to the organisation's public website, that usually means the one site the whole business uses, BC pages included.

Counts change as a business grows. A company with forty staff in Ontario today should look again before it hires the next ten.

Smaller teams in Ontario

A business with between one and forty-nine employees in Ontario is not under the website rule, but it is not outside the law either.

Other parts of the same regulation apply to it, such as providing information in an accessible format when somebody asks for it, at no extra cost.

For a website, that means being ready to supply a price list or a form in a version a customer can use, a request that pages built accessibly make rare.

What WCAG 2.0 AA means in practice

The guidelines are long, but most of what they ask of a small business site is familiar.

Images that carry meaning have text alternatives. Videos have captions. Text has enough contrast with its background. Everything works with a keyboard, and the keyboard focus is visible.

Form fields have labels, and errors are explained in words. Headings are real headings. Nothing depends on colour alone, and PDFs on the site count as web content too.

WCAG 2.1, published in June, includes all of 2.0 and adds more for phones and low vision, so meeting 2.1 AA also meets a rule written around 2.0.

A worked example

A trailer manufacturer in the Fraser Valley builds utility, cargo and equipment trailers, sold through dealers across Canada, several of them in Ontario. Around seventy people work at the plant.

Two sales representatives work from home in Ontario. The owner received the audit email and assumed the company had two years to rebuild its site or face penalties.

The claim mixed up where a business sells with where it employs people. With two employees in Ontario, the company was well short of fifty.

The company's lawyer confirmed the count, and pointed out that the two representatives did bring smaller duties, including providing information in an accessible format on request.

The owner decided to fold accessibility into a rebuild already planned for the winter: specified to WCAG 2.1 AA, with spec sheets published as web pages instead of scanned PDFs, and a dealer locator that works from a keyboard.

Why the work pays outside Ontario

The same changes help customers everywhere: older buyers who enlarge text, people reading a phone in sunlight, anyone with a broken wrist, and keyboard users.

Text alternatives and proper headings also give search engines more to read, and captions make a video useful with the sound off, which is how many people watch on phones.

And larger customers increasingly ask suppliers about accessibility, sometimes in contracts, wherever the supplier is based.

If you are covered

Two years and four months sounds generous. For a site with years of content, PDFs and tools supplied by other companies, it is not.

Start with an audit against WCAG 2.0 AA, using automated tools for the obvious failures and a person with a keyboard and a screen reader for the rest.

Fix the templates first, since every page inherits them, then the forms, then videos and PDFs. Include booking and payment tools, and ask their suppliers what they are doing.

If a rebuild is due before 2021, put WCAG 2.1 AA in the written specification and test against it before launch.

The counter-case

For a BC business with no employees in Ontario, there is no Ontario deadline, and accessibility work can follow the site's normal schedule rather than a vendor's.

A site due for a rebuild can simply fold the work into it.

The basics cost little anywhere, though: text alternatives, contrast, labelled forms and a working keyboard path. Check where your staff are first, then do the work at the scale and pace that fits.

Before replying to the email

1. Count your employees who work in Ontario.
2. Include part-time, seasonal and contract staff.
3. Ask a lawyer if the count is close.
4. Check your site against WCAG 2.0 AA.
5. Fix templates and forms first.
6. Caption videos and replace scanned PDFs.
7. Specify WCAG 2.1 AA for the next rebuild.

Step one decides everything else, and it is a fact you can check in minutes. A vendor's email cannot know how many people you employ in Ontario; you can.

Another set of rules that lands on a website's forms is covered in Canada's new guidance on meaningful consent.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.