Who the Accessibility Rules Apply To

Two separate questions

Whether a rule applies to you directly, and whether it reaches you anyway.

These get conflated, and the second is the one that affects far more businesses in the near term.

A firm with no legal obligation of its own can still find that accessibility requirements are a condition of the contracts it wants, which has the same practical effect and arrives faster.

What follows is a general description rather than legal advice, and whether an obligation applies to you specifically is a question for somebody qualified.

Direct obligations start narrow

The provincial framework begins with government and with public sector organisations named in regulations.

Federally regulated organisations have their own obligations under separate federal legislation, which covers a defined set of sectors rather than business generally.

At least one other province has had staged web accessibility requirements in force for some years, which apply to organisations operating there above certain size thresholds.

So a small private business operating in one province, selling to consumers, is in most cases not directly covered by any of it this month.

That position will change over years rather than weeks, and it changes through regulations rather than announcements.

How it reaches everybody else

Through purchasing, which is the mechanism that has always spread requirements faster than legislation.

An organisation with a duty to identify and remove barriers cannot meet it while buying things that create new ones.

So the requirement moves into what they buy: websites, documents, systems, training, signage, and anything customer-facing.

That appears in tender documents, in contract terms, and in the questions asked before a purchase order is issued.

The supplier does not have a legal obligation. The supplier has a commercial one, which for most businesses is the more immediate consideration.

Who is in the chain

• Provincial and municipal government and their agencies.
• Health authorities and public health organisations.
• School districts, colleges, and universities.
• Crown corporations and public utilities.
• Non-profits delivering publicly funded services.
• Larger private firms that supply any of the above.

The last is how the requirement travels two steps rather than one, and it is the route most small suppliers actually encounter it by.

What the questions look like

They arrive as a section in a tender or a form before a contract, and they are more specific than most suppliers expect.

Which standard your deliverable will meet, at which conformance level.

How you will test it, and whether testing is independent.

Whether you will provide a report, and when.

What happens if it fails after delivery, and at whose cost.

And sometimes evidence of previous work, or a statement about your own site, which is an awkward moment for a supplier whose own site fails.

A worked example

A three-person web firm bid for a small municipal project and reached a procurement questionnaire asking which conformance level the delivered site would meet and how it would be tested.

They had built accessible sites before without ever describing it in those terms, and their answer was vague as a result.

They lost, and the feedback identified that section as the weakest part of an otherwise competitive bid.

Before the next opportunity they wrote a one-page statement of their approach: the standard and level, what they test and how, what is included in the price, and what remains the client's responsibility for content added later.

They also fixed their own site, since being asked about it was foreseeable.

The document took an afternoon and has been reused in every public sector bid since.

Being ready is cheap

The preparation is small relative to what it protects.

Write down the standard and level you work to, in a paragraph.

Write down your testing approach: automated checking, keyboard testing, screen reader testing on key journeys, and whether an independent check is available at additional cost.

Fix your own site, because it will be looked at.

Keep one example you can point to.

That is an afternoon and it converts a question you dread into a section you can complete confidently, which in a competitive bid is worth more than the effort suggests.

Do not overclaim in a tender

A specific caution, because this is where suppliers get themselves into difficulty.

Claiming full conformance at the highest level, or asserting that a delivered site will be fully accessible without qualification, is a contractual commitment rather than marketing.

If it is tested and fails, that is a delivery failure with consequences, and public sector contracts are more likely than most to include a mechanism for it.

State what you will actually do, at a level you can achieve, with the testing named and the boundaries clear.

An honest and specific answer generally scores better than an expansive one, because the people evaluating it have read a great many expansive ones.

The private sector will follow

Slower, and by a similar route.

Large private organisations adopt supplier requirements from their public sector work and from their own risk position, and those requirements then apply to everybody in their chain.

The pattern has repeated with privacy, with security, and with environmental reporting: an obligation lands on large organisations and reaches small suppliers through purchasing within a few years.

A small firm that gets ready when it first sees the question is doing so on its own timetable rather than during a bid.

The counter-case

None of this is a reason for a business with no public sector exposure to act urgently.

A local trades business selling to homeowners will not see a procurement questionnaire, and preparing for one is effort with no return.

There is also a risk in over-preparing: writing elaborate policies for obligations you do not have consumes time and produces documents nobody reads, which is a familiar failure in small businesses that take compliance seriously.

The proportionate position depends on your customers rather than on the news. If you sell to public bodies or to their suppliers, prepare now. If you do not, fix the common failures because they are worth fixing and leave the paperwork.

Working out where you stand

1. List your customers from the last two years.
2. Mark any public body or publicly funded organisation.
3. Mark larger firms that supply those.
4. If any are marked, write your one-page approach.
5. Fix your own site, since it will be checked.
6. State only what you can deliver in any bid.
7. If none are marked, do the useful fixes and stop.

Step two takes ten minutes and determines everything else on the list.

What actually passed is covered in British Columbia passed an accessibility act.

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.