How to Make Your Website AODA Compliant in Ontario

The Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) includes web accessibility requirements for businesses with 50 or more employees in Ontario. Non-compliance creates legal risk and excludes a significant portion of potential clients.

What AODA Requires

AODA's web standards are based on WCAG 2.0 Level AA — covering four principles: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust. These principles ensure content can be accessed and used by people with disabilities including those using assistive technologies.

The Most Common Compliance Gaps

Missing alt text on images. Insufficient colour contrast. Form fields without associated labels. Videos without captions. PDFs not tagged for accessibility. Keyboard navigation that doesn't work for all interactive elements. These six issues account for the majority of WCAG failures.

Tools for Auditing Compliance

WAVE (web accessibility evaluation tool) is a free browser extension that identifies accessibility errors on any web page. Google Lighthouse (built into Chrome DevTools) includes an accessibility audit. Run these before investing in any other website improvements.

The fix: Run your homepage through the WAVE accessibility tool today. Fix any red errors before addressing yellow warnings. Adding descriptive alt text to all images is the most common and most impactful accessibility fix for most sites.