Most small business owners never think about whether their website works for someone using a screen reader, navigating by keyboard, or struggling with low-contrast text, until a customer cannot use it, or a complaint arrives. In Canada, website accessibility is partly a legal obligation and entirely a business one: an inaccessible site quietly turns away customers and creates risk. The standards are well defined, the fixes are mostly practical, and doing this well signals a business that pays attention. Here is what to know. This is orientation, not legal advice.
The rules, in plain terms
Canada has accessibility law at two levels. Ontario's AODA has required larger private and non-profit organizations (generally those with 50 or more employees) to make their public websites meet a recognized technical standard, WCAG 2.0 Level AA. Federally, the Accessible Canada Act sets expectations for federally regulated organizations. Whether a specific law strictly binds your business depends on your size and where and how you operate, so the honest answer to "do I legally have to?" is "it depends." But the direction is one way, toward more accessibility, not less, and human rights law can apply regardless of the size thresholds.
What "accessible" actually means
The shared benchmark is WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. You do not need to memorize it, but the common issues that trip up small business sites are concrete and fixable:
- Contrast: text that is too light against its background is hard to read for many people.
- Images without alt text: screen readers cannot describe a picture that has no text alternative.
- Keyboard navigation: everything clickable should also work without a mouse.
- Labels on forms: fields need clear labels so everyone knows what to enter.
- Captions on video, and a sensible heading structure so the page can be navigated.
Why it is good business, not just compliance
Roughly one in five people has a disability, so an inaccessible site is turning away a real slice of your market, and the same fixes that help them (clear structure, readable text, proper labels) also help everyone on a phone, on a slow connection, or in bright sunlight. Accessible sites tend to be better-built sites, and search engines reward the same clean structure. This is one of the rare cases where the compliant thing and the commercially smart thing are identical.
How to get there
Start by running your site through a free accessibility checker to find the obvious issues, then fix the high-impact basics above. Build accessibility into any redesign from the start rather than bolting it on later, where it is far more expensive. For most small businesses this is a modest, one-time effort with lasting payoff. If your site is important to your revenue, or you are in a regulated space, it is worth having someone check it against WCAG properly.