If your organization has 50 or more employees in Ontario, your public website and content posted after January 1, 2012 have needed to meet WCAG 2.0 AA since January 1, 2021. That covers a lot of Ottawa: tech firms, clinics and dental groups, law and accounting practices, shops, construction companies, non-profits.

Every municipality is a public body under the regulation, so the City of Ottawa and bodies like school boards, hospitals, colleges, universities and transit carry the WCAG 2.0 AA duty with no size limit — plus a two-year reporting cycle whose last deadline, December 31, 2025, has passed. Ontario.ca asks anyone who missed it to file anyway.

Some Ottawa organizations are federally regulated — banks, telecoms, interprovincial transport, federal bodies. Those also fall under the Accessible Canada Act, a separate federal law with administrative penalties of up to $250,000 per violation. The ACA doesn't replace the AODA. Which one — or both — reaches you depends on how you're regulated, and that's a question for a lawyer.

Ontario's 2023 review found no meaningful enforcement of the AODA, and we won't pretend otherwise. In Ottawa the pressure usually arrives a different way: procurement. If government and public sector buyers are part of your pipeline, expect accessibility questions in the process — and expect a scan report or audit to be the thing that answers them.

Ottawa businesses and non-profits with 20 or more employees file an accessibility compliance report by December 31, 2026. At 20 to 49 staff it covers customer service, not your website; at 50 plus, the website duty is part of what you're confirming — so check the site before you sign.

Toronto consultancies quote CAD $2,400 to $25,000 for a one-time audit. Before spending anything like that, run the free automatic scan: it maps your site against WCAG 2.0 AA, finds the machine-detectable problems (about 57% of issues by volume, Deque 2021), and tells you honestly how much is left for a human to review.