AODA Website Requirements for Ontario Businesses: Which WCAG Level Applies?

The Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, 2005 (AODA) sets the goal; the detailed rules live in Ontario Regulation 191/11, the Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation. The regulation applies to every organization that provides goods, services or facilities and has at least one employee in Ontario. The website rule in section 14 is narrower. It covers the Government of Ontario, the Legislative Assembly, designated public sector organizations such as municipalities, and large organizations, which the regulation defines as having 50 or more employees in Ontario.

The count is employees in Ontario, not worldwide. A Japanese or American company with a 60-person Ontario office is a large organization for this purpose; a 500-person company with 12 staff in Toronto is not. The duty falls on whoever controls the website, directly or through a contract that allows the product to be modified, so outsourcing the build to an agency or running on a hosted platform does not move the obligation away from you.

Section 14 still names WCAG 2.0 Level AA, and the definition points to the W3C Recommendation dated December 2008. That remains true in the current consolidation of the regulation, which was last amended in 2026. Two success criteria are excluded for private and broader public sector organizations: 1.2.4 Captions (Live) and 1.2.5 Audio Descriptions (Pre-recorded). Under WCAG's conformance rules, Level AA means meeting every Level A and Level AA success criterion, not only the AA ones.

Many vendor articles say AODA requires WCAG 2.1 or 2.2. The law does not say that. What is true is that building to a newer version is a sensible engineering choice. W3C states that WCAG 2.2 is backward compatible, so content that meets 2.2 also meets 2.0 and 2.1, with one caveat: 2.2 removed success criterion 4.1.1 Parsing, and W3C says organizations bound to an older version may need to keep testing and reporting it. WCAG 2.2 adds nine success criteria, six of them at Level A or AA, including Target Size (Minimum), Focus Not Obscured (Minimum), Dragging Movements and Accessible Authentication (Minimum).

Our recommendation for a new build or redesign is to specify WCAG 2.2 Level AA in the contract, add 4.1.1 to the test plan, and document conformance against 2.0 AA for AODA purposes. You meet the law today and avoid rework if Ontario or a large customer updates the reference later.

The rule covers public internet websites and web content, including web-based applications, that the organization controls. A client portal, a booking flow or a store checkout running on your domain counts. Content published before January 1, 2012 is outside the rule. For large organizations the WCAG rule applies to internet websites only, so intranets and extranets do not have to meet WCAG, but the general duty to provide accessible formats on request still applies to them.

There is also a practicability exception. An organization may consider, among other things, whether commercial software or tools are available. Separately, information is unconvertible when conversion is not technically feasible or the technology is not readily available; if someone asks for an accessible version of such content, you must explain why it cannot be converted and provide a summary. Treat this as a narrow exception for specific items, not a reason to skip a whole site. A third-party widget you could replace or configure is not impracticable just because it is inconvenient.

The headline figure of $100,000 a day appears in two places, and both are narrower than they sound. Under section 37 of the Act, a corporation convicted of an offence, such as filing false information in an accessibility report or ignoring a director's order, faces a fine of up to $100,000 for each day the offence continues. Directors and officers who fail to take reasonable care to prevent it face up to $50,000 a day.

For a regulation breach such as a non-conforming website, the usual route is a director's order to comply, which can include an administrative penalty. Schedule 3 of the regulation sets the amounts for corporations by the severity of the contravention and the history of previous ones: from $500 for a minor contravention with little history to $15,000 for a major contravention with a major history. Only when both impact and history are major may a director treat the penalty as daily, up to $100,000. Ontario's reporting page also warns that not filing can lead to enforcement measures, including financial penalties.

The practical risk for most businesses is therefore less a sudden six-figure fine than a compliance order with a deadline, a human rights complaint from a customer who could not use the site, or a procurement team that asks for a conformance statement you cannot provide.

Businesses and non-profits with 20 or more employees file an accessibility compliance report every three years, and the current deadline is December 31, 2026. Filing is done through Ontario's Accessibility Compliance Reporting Portal: register or sign in, choose New Submission, then the Accessibility Compliance Report option. Designated public sector organizations report every two years; their last deadline was December 31, 2025, and Ontario says a missed 2025 report must still be filed.

Because section 37 makes false or misleading information in a report an offence, do not answer the website questions from memory. Run the audit described below first, and record what you checked and when.

Most failures are basic. The 2026 WebAIM Million, an automated scan of the top one million home pages run in February 2026, detected WCAG 2 failures on 95.9% of them, with an average of 56.1 errors per page. Six issue types made up 96% of detected errors: low-contrast text (83.9% of pages), missing image alt text (53.1%), missing form labels (51%), empty links (46.3%), empty buttons (30.6%) and missing document language (13.5%). Fixing those six on your templates removes most of what an automated tool will find. The rest needs a person: automated tools cannot tell whether alt text is meaningful or whether a form can be completed with a keyboard.

Companies that run bilingual English–Japanese sites face a similar shift at home. Japan's amended Act for Eliminating Discrimination against Persons with Disabilities took effect on April 1, 2024, and the Cabinet Office states that providing reasonable accommodation is now mandatory for private businesses. A site built to WCAG 2.2 AA, with the correct lang attribute on each language version, is a single standard you can apply to both markets instead of maintaining two sets of rules.