Canada’s Accessibility Laws
An Overview of Canadian Accessibility Standards
Canada’s stride towards becoming a more accessible country have produced a number of new accessibility regulations. The recent laws go beyond just discouraging both public and private organizations against discrimination but to remove barriers to any possible challenges to accessibility. These standards strive to create equitable, barrier-free access to communities, workplaces, and services for people with disabilities.
ACA
The Accessible Canada Act (ACA) is a Canada-wide accessibility act that applies to the federal public sector, Crown corporations, and all federally-regulated organizations, building on the Canadian Human Rights Act and focuses on the prohibition of discrimination based on disability.
Bill Title: C-81
AODA
The Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) is a law that sets out a process for developing and enforcing accessibility standards. Under the AODA, the government is responsible for creating accessibility standards that organizations must follow. These standards will help us make Ontario more accessible by 2025.
AMA
The Accessibility for Manitobans Act (AMA) affects all Manitobans. It provides a process to remove barriers for people with disabilities and includes those who can identify, remove and prevent barriers to accessibility. The AMA consists of five standard building blocks for making real, measurable and effective changes to accessibility.
Legal and Compliance Considerations
Digital accessibility is also a legal obligation. In Canada, businesses and organizations must follow accessibility legislation at both the federal and provincial levels. Separately, several provinces have adopted their own accessibility laws, some of which provide clarity on the actual technical standards for those jurisdictions.
✅Accessible Canada Act (ACA) – Applies to federally regulated industries
✅Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) – Requires public and private organizations in Ontario to comply with WCAG 2.0 Level AA
✅Accessible BC Act, AMA (Manitoba), and Nova Scotia Accessibility Act – Enforce similar requirements
Non-compliance can result in:
- Fines and lawsuits
- Loss of public contracts
- Reputational damage
What Are Web Accessibility Standards?
Typically, web accessibility standards are based on four fundamental principles. WCAG is the international standard for website accessibility. These guidelines provide a clear, technical, and measurable framework that helps website owners ensure their content is accessible to all users. According to these standards, a website should be:
- Perceivable: Information available on the site must be easy to understand
- Operable: Users should be able to use various assistive technologies on the website
- Understandable: The content should be predictable and easy to understand
- Robust: A website and its content should be accessible from various devices and browsers
Understanding Digital Accessibility Standards
Accessibility testing is a step-by-step process of thoroughly examining your website, apps and other digital content against the standards dictated by the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAGs) to make digital content usable to as many people as possible.
Each WCAG guideline has a list of requirements, or “success criteria,” for testing your content for accessibility based on three levels of conformance. The accessibility standards are based on the four fundamental principles known as POUR: perceivable, operable, understandable and robust.
- A — minimum accessibility
- AA — addresses the major, most common accessibility issues
- AAA — the highest standard
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