On a conviction under the AODA, fines can reach up to $100,000 a day for a corporation and up to $50,000 a day for an individual. Directors and officers carry their own duty to take reasonable care, and falling short of it is a separate offence — also up to $50,000 a day. Those are the statutory maximums: the ceiling the law sets for the most serious, deliberate cases, not the bill an ordinary business should expect.

The day-to-day mechanism isn't a courtroom — it's administrative penalties, and the numbers are far lower. For a corporation they run $500 to $15,000; for an individual, $200 to $2,000. The amount is set by two things: how serious the issue is and your compliance history. The per-day, six-figure maximum only enters the picture at the very top corner of that grid — a major violation paired with a major history. For a first look at a small-business website, that's not the world you're in.

We're not going to pretend the fines are chasing you, because Ontario's own review says they aren't. The Fourth Review of the AODA, delivered in 2023, put it bluntly: “there is no meaningful enforcement of the AODA.” At the time the province had roughly 25 staff overseeing about 412,000 obligated organizations. That's the reality — and any vendor telling you inspectors are at the door is selling you fear.

If enforcement isn't the reason to act, four things are. There's the accessibility compliance report due December 31, 2026 for organizations with 20 or more employees — a legal filing where you confirm where you stand. There's procurement: government and public sector buyers ask accessibility questions before they sign, and a scan report is what answers them. There's the risk of a complaint or a lawsuit from someone who can't use your site. And there's the plainest one of all — customers who land on your site, can't use it, and quietly leave.

A handful of organizations — banks, telecoms, interprovincial transport, federal bodies — are federally regulated, and they fall under a separate law: the Accessible Canada Act. Its administrative penalties reach up to $250,000 per violation. The ACA doesn't replace the AODA; it sits alongside it, and whether one law or both reaches you depends on how you're regulated. That's a question for a lawyer, not a scanner.

Whatever the enforcement odds, an inaccessible site is a real problem for real people — and it's fixable. Start with the free automatic scan. It checks your pages against WCAG 2.0 AA and catches the machine-detectable problems — about 57% of issues by volume (Deque, 2021) — like missing image descriptions, faint text and unlabelled forms. It also tells you honestly how much is left for a human to review, before you spend anything on an audit.