What AODA Means for Your Corporate Website

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October 16, 2026

Ontario public-website requirements generally apply to businesses and non-profits with 50 or more employees and to designated public sector organizations. The regulation has scope limits and exceptions; claims of "zero exemptions" would be inaccurate. This article summarizes the public Ontario guidance we rely on. It is general information, not legal advice.

Under section 14 of Ontario's Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation, covered public websites and web content published after January 1, 2012 must meet WCAG 2.0 Level AA, with two stated exceptions: live captions (success criterion 1.2.4) and pre-recorded audio description (1.2.5). The requirement concerns content the organization controls directly, or controls through a contractual relationship that allows it to modify the content.

Ontario's own guidance describes further limits. Content can be excluded where meeting the requirement is not practicable, for example because of the technology involved or the availability of commercial software. Ontario also publishes a page explaining when public websites are not required to be accessible under this rule. Any organization relying on a scope limit or exception should read the regulation text itself and get legal advice where the stakes matter.

Accessible-format and communication-support duties under the Information and Communications Standards can still apply to content that falls outside the website rule. And separately, businesses and non-profits with 20 or more employees have accessibility compliance reporting obligations even where the website standard does not apply to them.

WCAG 2.0 Level AA covers perceivable, operable, understandable and robust content: text alternatives for images, sufficient colour contrast, keyboard access to all functionality, visible focus, correctly labelled form fields, a logical heading structure, and content that assistive technology can interpret. Automated tools can check some of these signals. Many criteria — whether alt text is actually meaningful, whether focus order makes sense, whether a screen reader announces changes correctly — require human judgement and manual testing.

Fortress targets WCAG 2.2 Level AA, which adds newer criteria on top of WCAG 2.0. This is our service target; it does not change Ontario's legal baseline, and no scan or fix guarantees legal compliance.

Our no-cost scan uses Google mobile PageSpeed for the submitted URL and Fortress HTML checks on up to 500 discoverable same-host pages. It may miss pages and issues, and provider results can be unavailable. Findings always need human review, and a full evaluation needs keyboard and screen-reader testing.

Ontario requirements: https://www.ontario.ca/page/how-make-websites-accessible Exceptions: https://www.ontario.ca/page/when-public-websites-are-not-accessible Regulation: https://www.ontario.ca/laws/regulation/110191 WCAG 2.2: https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG22/

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Last updated: October 2026