Accessibility is now a legal obligation for most public bodies in Canada, and a plain requirement of doing the job well for everyone else. We audit what you have, fix what blocks people, and leave your team able to keep it that way.
Request an auditThree separate rules now point at the same technical standard, WCAG 2.1 Level AA. In British Columbia, prescribed public sector organizations came into scope of the Accessible British Columbia Act on 1 September 2023, with a second group following on 1 September 2024. Federally regulated organizations publish accessibility plans and annual progress reports under the Accessible Canada Act, which sets a goal of a barrier free Canada by 2040.
If you serve people in the United States, the Department of Justice rule for ADA Title II lands on 26 April 2027 for entities serving 50,000 people or more, and 26 April 2028 for smaller ones. It reaches contractors delivering services for those governments too.
Sources: US Department of Justice ADA Title II web rule; Accessible British Columbia Act and its regulation; Accessible Canada Act and the Accessible Canada Regulations. Verified September 2026.
We test the live site against WCAG 2.1 Level AA, which is the standard every Canadian and US rule now points at. Automated tools catch perhaps a third of real problems, so the rest is manual: keyboard-only navigation, screen reader passes, colour contrast, focus order, form labels and error handling. You get a findings list ordered by severity, not a 400-page tool export.
Not every issue is equal. A form you cannot complete with a keyboard, a PDF a screen reader cannot open, or a contrast failure on your emergency notices will stop someone using the service entirely. Those go first, ahead of the long tail of minor warnings that make a compliance score look bad but block nobody.
Most sites pass an audit and then drift, because the fixes lived in one-off pages instead of the components everyone reuses. We push accessibility into the design system itself: contrast built into the colour tokens, focus states on every interactive component, heading structure baked into the templates your team edits.
For public bodies this is usually the biggest gap. Annual reports, board minutes, budgets and consultation papers are published as PDFs that were never tagged, so they are effectively invisible to a screen reader. Accessibility obligations cover those documents, not just the pages linking to them.
The BC and federal rules ask for more than a compliant site. They ask for a published accessibility plan, a way for people to give feedback on barriers, and progress reports on what you did about it. We help write those, and make sure the plan and the feedback tool are themselves accessible, which is a detail that gets missed surprisingly often.
Accessibility is not a launch milestone, it is a maintenance habit. We re-test on a schedule, and we train whoever writes your content, because most new barriers arrive later in a well-meaning page edit rather than in the original build.
The Accessible British Columbia Act asks prescribed organizations for an accessibility committee, a published plan and a working feedback tool. If yours exists as a PDF nobody can read, it is not doing the job it was written for.
Community sites carry emergency notices, housing applications and health information, often to people on rural connections and older devices. Accessibility here is not a compliance exercise, it is whether someone can access a service at all.
Funders increasingly ask about accessibility, and any organization serving people in the United States now has ADA Title II dates on the calendar. Both are much cheaper to answer before somebody asks.
Accessibility overlaps almost completely with the rest of a good build, which is why we run it inside the same engagement rather than as a separate line item. Government and public sector work
In practice, WCAG 2.1 Level AA. It is the standard the Accessible Canada Act points at through EN 301 549, it is what the US Department of Justice adopted for ADA Title II, and it is what provincial rules are aligned to. If someone offers you a different or vaguer target, ask which regulation they are working from.
Prescribed public sector organizations must establish an accessibility committee, develop and publish an accessibility plan, and provide a tool for the public to give feedback on barriers. At least half of the committee must be people with disabilities or people from organizations that support them, and at least one member must be Indigenous. The first group of organizations came into scope on 1 September 2023 and a second group on 1 September 2024, so most bodies are now past their date and into the maintenance cycle.
It applies to federally regulated entities, which means Parliament, the Government of Canada, Crown corporations, and federally regulated industries such as banking, telecommunications, interprovincial transport, broadcasting and postal services. Organizations in scope with ten or more employees publish a three year accessibility plan, run a feedback process and publish annual progress reports. The Act sets a goal of a barrier free Canada by 2040. Provincial and municipal bodies are covered by their own provincial legislation instead.
The US Department of Justice rule sets WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the technical standard for state and local government web content and mobile apps. Compliance is due 26 April 2027 for public entities serving populations of 50,000 or more, and 26 April 2028 for smaller entities and special purpose districts. It also reaches contractors delivering services on behalf of those governments, which is the part organizations tend to discover late.
Yes, and that is most of this work. An audit does not commit you to a rebuild. Plenty of sites need a focused round of fixes to templates, documents and forms rather than a new website, and if that is what we find we will say so rather than quote you for a redesign you do not need.
No. Almost everything accessibility asks for is good design under a different name: readable contrast, clear focus states, sensible heading structure, forms that explain their own errors, and text you can resize without the layout collapsing. The genuine constraints are on colour contrast and on text over busy images, and those are solvable in the design rather than bolted on afterwards.
We'll audit it against WCAG 2.1 AA and send you the findings, ranked by what actually blocks people.
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