Ontario businesses with 50 or more employees are legally required to make their websites conform to WCAG 2.0 Level AA, and the compliance-report deadline for everyone over 20 is December 31, 2026. A $50-a-month overlay widget does not get you there — and can raise your legal risk. I fix accessibility at the code level, the way it actually has to be done.
Here’s the uncomfortable part most vendors won’t tell you: the accessibility widget you were sold does not make your site compliant. Automated overlays catch a minority of WCAG issues, can’t fix the rest, and in 2025 the FTC ordered one overlay vendor to pay $1 million for claiming otherwise. Meanwhile more than 5,000 digital-accessibility lawsuits were filed that year, a growing share of them against sites that already had a widget installed. Accessibility is engineering work. It gets done in the markup, the CSS, and the components — not by a script bolted on at the end.
I remediate Ontario business websites against WCAG 2.0 Level AA — the exact standard the AODA regulation names — so you’re compliant in fact, not just in appearance. If you want the full legal picture first, start with the complete AODA website accessibility guide; if you’re ready to fix it, that’s what this service is for.
Ontario’s Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation splits the duty at two employee counts, and mixing them up is how businesses get caught out.
Penalties under the AODA run up to $50,000 a day for an individual and $100,000 a day for a corporation, with directors and officers personally on the hook. The 20-vs-50 threshold breakdown and the deadline explainer walk through exactly where your business lands.
Real remediation starts with a real audit — an automated scan for the obvious failures, then manual keyboard and screen-reader testing for everything a scanner can’t catch. From there I fix it in the code:
If your site runs on WordPress, Divi, or Elementor, the page builder itself is usually part of the problem — I cover why in the AODA-on-WordPress guide. The cleanest, cheapest fix is almost always to remediate during a redesign or a move to a properly built frontend rather than patching a fragile theme forever.
On the enterprise builds I worked on — Sportsnet.ca’s platform migration, Postmedia’s 13-plus newspaper sites on WordPress VIP — accessibility wasn’t a nice-to-have tacked on at the end. It was in the acceptance criteria and it got audited before anything shipped. That’s the bar I bring to a Guelph dental clinic or a Cambridge manufacturer: the same standard the big media platforms are held to, delivered by one accountable engineer instead of a faceless subscription.
Pricing tracks the size of the site and the depth of the problems the audit turns up. A focused remediation on a small brochure site is a flat rate; a full WCAG 2.0 AA pass on a large or e-commerce site, or remediation folded into a redesign, is quoted individually after the audit. Whatever you’d have spent on an overlay subscription is better treated as a down payment on work that actually holds up. Tell me about your site and you get a clear, honest estimate with no hidden fees.
No. Overlays and widgets catch only a minority of WCAG success criteria and can’t achieve full conformance — that’s the settled W3C/WAI position, and it’s why the FTC fined one overlay vendor $1 million in 2025. Real conformance takes code-level fixes plus manual testing with assistive technology.
The IASR website requirement only binds organizations with 50 or more Ontario employees, so it may not legally apply to you. But the Ontario Human Rights Code and the wave of accessibility lawsuits aren’t gated by employee count, and an inaccessible site turns away real customers either way.
Because a human tested it. An automated scan can tell you a site isn’t compliant; it can never confirm that it is. Every remediation includes manual keyboard and screen-reader testing against the WCAG 2.0 AA success criteria, not just a green scanner badge.
Yes, and that’s the most cost-effective time to do it. Building WCAG conformance into a rebuild costs a fraction of bolting it on afterward. If you’re already planning a move off Wix, Squarespace, or an aging WordPress theme, we fold the accessibility work straight into that project.
The December 31, 2026 deadline isn’t getting further away, and the lawsuits aren’t slowing down. Find out exactly where your site stands against WCAG 2.0 AA — no widget in the quote.
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