If your organization has 50 or more employees in Ontario, your public website and any content posted after January 1, 2012 have had to meet WCAG 2.0 AA — a plain set of rules for making a site usable — since January 1, 2021. In London that pulls in a lot of the insurance and finance offices, the manufacturers out toward the 401, medical and dental groups, law and accounting practices, and mid-sized non-profits. Under 50 staff in Ontario, you're a “small organization” and this particular website rule doesn't apply to you.

Every municipality is a public body under the regulation, so the City of London carries the WCAG 2.0 AA duty with no size limit at all — and so do the London Transit Commission, the school boards, the hospitals, and Western University and Fanshawe College, since colleges and universities are named directly. Public bodies also file a compliance report every two years, and that deadline — December 31, 2025 — has already passed. Ontario.ca asks anyone who missed it to file anyway. In practice that means those sites are held to the same WCAG 2.0 AA bar as any large private company, no head-count exemption to hide behind.

Because London leans on insurance and financial services, some local employers are federally regulated — banks and the like answer to federal rules, not the province's. Those organizations fall under the Accessible Canada Act, a separate federal law with administrative penalties of up to $250,000 per violation. It doesn't replace the AODA. Which law reaches you — one, the other, or both — depends on how you're regulated, and that's a question for a lawyer.

On paper, an AODA conviction can carry fines of up to $50,000 a day for an individual and up to $100,000 a day for a corporation. Those are the legal maximums, and we won't pretend they're routine: Ontario's own 2023 review of the law found there's no meaningful enforcement right now. In London the real pressure usually arrives a quieter way — procurement. Western, Fanshawe, the hospitals, the City and LTC all buy from local suppliers, and accessibility questions turn up in that process. A scan report or audit is often the thing that answers them.

London businesses and non-profits with 20 or more employees file an accessibility compliance report by December 31, 2026. From 20 to 49 employees it covers the customer service standard, not your website. At 50 or more, the website duty is part of what you're signing off on — so it's worth checking the site before you confirm anything on the form. The report is a self-declaration you sign, not an audit someone runs for you — which is exactly why it helps to know where your site actually stands before you put your name to it.

Canadian consultancies quote CAD $2,400 to $25,000 for a one-time audit. Before you spend anything near that, run the free automatic scan. It checks your site against WCAG 2.0 AA and finds the machine-detectable problems — about 57% of accessibility issues by volume (Deque, 2021), things like missing image descriptions, faint text and unlabelled forms — then tells you honestly how much is left for a person to review. No account, about ten minutes.