The Accessible Canada Act and a Small Business Website

What became law on Friday

The Accessible Canada Act received Royal Assent on Friday, June 21, the final step in becoming law.

It is Canada's first federal accessibility law. Its stated aim is a country without barriers for people with disabilities, in areas under federal authority, within about two decades.

Most of what it requires arrives later, through regulations not yet written, which will also set when covered organisations must act.

For most small businesses, the short answer is that it does not apply. The longer answer is why it still deserves twenty minutes of an owner's attention.

Who it covers

The Act applies to the federal government itself, to Crown corporations, and to private businesses in industries regulated federally rather than provincially.

In practice that means banks, telecommunications and broadcasting companies, airlines, railways, and other transportation that crosses provincial or national borders.

A dental office, a restaurant, a roofing contractor or a shop on a main street is regulated provincially, and nothing in this Act requires anything of its website.

What it asks of the organisations it covers

• Accessibility plans, prepared in consultation with people with disabilities and published.
• A feedback process, so the public can report the barriers they meet.
• Progress reports on what has changed since the last plan.
• Standards, written by a new organisation created to develop them.
• Enforcement, mainly by a new Accessibility Commissioner, with inspections and penalties.
• A broad scope: employment, buildings, technology, communication, services and transportation.

The fourth is the one that matters beyond federal industries. Once Canadian accessibility standards exist, they become an obvious yardstick for everyone else, whether or not a law requires it.

Why it is still worth reading

Three reasons, none of them about obligations.

The first is direction. Several provinces, including Ontario, Manitoba and Nova Scotia, already have accessibility laws of their own.

Ontario's law requires larger organisations to make their websites meet WCAG 2.0 at level AA by the start of 2021. The federal Act points the same way.

The second is the businesses you work with. Organisations that must publish accessibility plans are likely to examine the tools and documents they rely on, some of which come from small suppliers.

The third is customers. People with low vision, colour blindness, hearing loss or an unsteady hand already use your website. The law did not create them; it names them.

What WCAG is, briefly

The Act does not name a technical standard for websites. Almost every rule that does name one points to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, known as WCAG.

WCAG is published by the World Wide Web Consortium, the body that maintains web standards. Version 2.1, released last June, is current; most existing rules still reference 2.0, from 2008.

Each version has three levels: A, AA and AAA. Level AA is the practical target, and the one federal government websites already have to meet.

Version 2.1 at AA includes everything in 2.0 at AA, plus additions aimed mainly at phones, low vision and cognitive disabilities.

A worked example

A hearing clinic in a suburban medical building was planning a new website for the autumn, and the owner asked whether the Act covered it.

It did not. But the question prompted a look at the existing site, and the findings were uncomfortable for a clinic whose patients are mostly older.

Body text was pale grey on white. The booking form had hints inside the fields instead of labels, and each hint vanished once somebody started typing.

The phone number sat inside a banner image, unreadable to a screen reader. And the introductory video, on a hearing clinic's website, had no captions.

Each choice had been made for appearance, by people never asked to consider anything else.

The new site's brief gained one line: WCAG 2.1 at level AA, checked before launch. The colours were tested for contrast before any page was designed, an afternoon's work rather than a rebuild.

What AA looks like on a small site

On a small business site, most of the work is a short list of checks.

Text has enough contrast with its background: a ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 for ordinary body text. Images that carry information have a text alternative. Video has captions.

Everything works with a keyboard alone, with a visible outline showing where you are. Forms have labels that stay in place, and error messages that say what went wrong.

Pages still work zoomed to twice their size, and on a narrow phone without sideways scrolling. Version 2.1 also asks that form fields be marked so browsers can fill in names, emails and phone numbers.

Cheaper during a redesign than after

Contrast is a decision about colours, labels about form design, headings about structure. Each costs almost nothing at the planning stage.

Retrofitting the same things into a finished site means reopening templates, retesting forms and sometimes redrawing a design the business has grown attached to.

So for a business outside the Act, the most useful response is a line in the next redesign's brief, where the work is smallest.

Testing without special tools

Some checks need only the site and a few minutes.

Put the mouse aside and press the Tab key repeatedly. You should reach every link, button and form field, and see where you are at each step.

Zoom the browser until the text is twice its normal size. Nothing should overlap, disappear or need sideways scrolling to read.

Then turn on VoiceOver on an iPhone, or TalkBack on Android, and listen to your home page. Images and buttons with no words attached stand out at once.

The counter-case

For most businesses outside the Act there is no deadline, and it would be wrong to invent one.

A five-page site with no forms and no video has less to check, and the work may be an afternoon rather than a project.

Level AAA is not a sensible target either; the guidelines themselves advise against requiring it for entire sites.

And a site due to be rebuilt this year is better fixed in the rebuild than patched now.

Make WCAG 2.1 at level AA the target, and build it into the next change you were going to make anyway.

Before the next redesign

1. Check whether your industry is federally regulated.
2. Note any clients who are.
3. Add WCAG 2.1 AA to your next website brief.
4. Test your colours for contrast before design starts.
5. Try your site with only a keyboard.
6. Caption the videos you publish.
7. Ask your web company to review forms and labels.

Step three is the one that turns a news item into something useful. A line in the brief costs nothing, and it settles colours, forms and structure before anybody grows attached to the wrong ones.

One of the most common barriers in practice is covered in keyboard traps in pop-ups and chat windows.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.