The short answer
It depends on who regulates you. The Accessible Canada Act binds federally regulated entities such as banks, airlines and telecoms, not every Canadian business. A typical provincially regulated small business is not directly bound. The basic accessibility work is still worth doing, because it also makes your pages machine-readable.
Two wrong answers circulate about website accessibility in Canada. The first is that it is a legal minefield and every business is one complaint away from trouble. The second is that it is purely optional, a nice-to-have for companies with budget to spare. Both are wrong, and they are wrong in a way that is easy to fix once you know which regulator has your business.
The law is jurisdictional, not universal
The federal statute is the Accessible Canada Act, assented to in June 2019 [2]. Its stated purpose is the realization of a Canada without barriers on or before January 1, 2040, through the identification and removal of barriers in seven named areas - and one of those areas is expressly information and communication technologies [1]. So the Act does contemplate websites. The question is who it contemplates them for.
Section 7 answers that. The Act applies to federal departments and Crown corporations, portions of the federal public administration, the Canadian Forces, and to any person, partnership or unincorporated organization that operates a work, undertaking or business that is within the legislative authority of Parliament [1]. That last phrase is the one that matters to a business owner. It captures federally regulated sectors - banking, telecommunications, broadcasting, air and rail transport, interprovincial trucking and the like. It does not capture the corner bakery, the local law firm, the plumbing contractor or the landscaping company. Those are provincially regulated, and the Accessible Canada Act does not reach them.
That is the plain answer most articles on this subject avoid giving. If you run a provincially regulated small business, the federal accessibility statute imposes no direct duty on your website.
What the Act asks of the entities it does bind
It is worth knowing what falls on a business that is caught, because it clarifies what the law is actually aimed at. A regulated entity must prepare and publish an accessibility plan covering its policies and practices for identifying, removing and preventing barriers, and must consult persons with disabilities in preparing it [1]. It must establish and publish a feedback process for barriers people encounter [1]. It must publish progress reports on how the plan is going [1]. Updated plans are due no later than the third anniversary of the last one [1]. Enforcement runs through administrative monetary penalties, with the maximum penalty for a violation capped at $250,000 in regulations [1].
Notice what that is: a duty to plan, publish and report. It is not a technical conformance rule for every page you own. The one place technical conformance does appear is narrow and specific. The Accessible Canada Regulations require the accessibility plan to be published in a format that meets Level AA conformance under the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, on the entity's main public digital platform, either on the home screen itself or one hyperlink away from it [3]. The regulations define those guidelines by reference to the version published by the World Wide Web Consortium in both English and French [3]. So the well-known WCAG standard enters Canadian law here through the back door - as a format requirement for a particular document, not as a general obligation on the whole internet.
There is also a size floor. A private-sector regulated entity with an average of fewer than ten employees is exempt from the planning, feedback and progress-report sections entirely, and that exemption stops applying in a year where the average reaches ten or more [3]. Entities with 100 or more employees were given an earlier first deadline than those with 10 to 99 [3].
Provinces run their own regimes
Accessibility is not a federal monopoly. Several provinces have their own statutes, and they are structured differently from one another - which is why a blanket claim about "Canadian accessibility law" is almost always inaccurate somewhere.
British Columbia's Accessible British Columbia Act defines a barrier as anything that hinders full and equal participation, expressly including barriers caused by information, communications or technologies [6]. But its accessibility-plan and committee duties apply to government and to prescribed organizations or classes of organizations [6]. An ordinary BC private business is not caught unless it has been prescribed. The Act also lets standards be made later in areas including the delivery of services and information and communications [6].
Nova Scotia's Accessibility Act aims at an accessible Nova Scotia by 2030 and lists information and communication among the areas where barriers are to be prevented and removed [7]. Its accessibility standards may apply to individuals or organizations that employ others, offer accommodation, or provide goods, services or information to the public [7]. That is a much wider net on paper - but the obligation only bites for a private business once a standard has actually been made and applied to it.
The pattern across provinces is the same shape: a framework statute first, specific standards later, public sector first and private sector by stages. If you want to know where you sit, the question is not "is there a law" but "has a standard been made that applies to an organization like mine, and has its compliance date arrived".
The quieter legal exposure is human rights law
Accessibility statutes are the loud part. The older and more general exposure is human rights legislation. The Canadian Human Rights Act makes disability a prohibited ground of discrimination [4], and states that it is a discriminatory practice, in the provision of goods, services, facilities or accommodation customarily available to the general public, to deny access to them or to differentiate adversely against an individual on a prohibited ground [4].
That Act operates within the purview of matters coming within the legislative authority of Parliament [4], so it does not itself govern a provincially regulated business. Each province has its own human rights legislation with comparable service-discrimination provisions, and that is the one to look at if you are provincially regulated. The practical point is that a website which is the only way to book, order or apply is arguably a service, and a service nobody using a screen reader can complete is a harder position to defend than a merely imperfect one.
Why the cheap 80% is worth doing anyway
Here is the commercial argument, which is stronger than the legal one for most readers. The 2022 Canadian Survey on Disability found that 27% of Canadians aged 15 and over - roughly 8.0 million people - had one or more disabilities limiting them in daily activities, up from 22% in 2017 [5]. Pain-related, flexibility, mobility and mental-health-related disabilities were the most prevalent types [5]. Not all of those affect web use. Plenty do, and the share is rising rather than falling.
But the reason to do the work is not only the audience. There is a set of accessibility basics that costs almost nothing and happens to be identical to the work that makes a page parseable by machines:
- Real alt text on images that carry meaning. A screen reader announces it; a crawler reads it as the only text content that image will ever have.
- Sufficient colour contrast on body text, buttons and link states. Low-contrast grey-on-grey is a readability problem for everyone in daylight, not only for low-vision users.
- Keyboard navigability - every link, button and form control reachable and operable with Tab and Enter, with a visible focus outline. If it only works on hover or on a mouse click, it does not work for a meaningful slice of visitors.
- Correct heading order - one H1, then H2s, then H3s, matching the actual structure of the page. Assistive technology uses headings to skim. So does anything trying to extract a document outline.
- Labelled form fields - every input tied to a visible label rather than a placeholder that vanishes when you start typing.
Every item on that list is a semantic decision. Alt text supplies text where there was only an image. Heading order supplies structure where there was only styled text. Form labels supply meaning where there were only boxes. A page built this way is easier for a person with a disability to use and easier for a search crawler or an AI assistant to read correctly, because both are doing the same job: reconstructing what the page means from what the markup says. That dual payoff is why this work is worth doing regardless of whether any statute requires it of you.
Where you honestly do not need to spend
If you are a provincially regulated business with a five-page brochure site, you do not need a paid accessibility audit, a conformance statement, or an accessibility overlay widget. Overlays in particular are a poor trade: the script sits on top of markup that is still wrong underneath, and it cannot invent information that missing alt text never carried. Nor do you need to chase full WCAG Level AA conformance on every page - that requirement, in the federal regulations, attaches to a published accessibility plan by a regulated entity [3], and if you have no such plan to publish, you have no such obligation. Do the five basics well and stop. The last 20% of conformance is where the cost curve turns steep, and it is not where your risk or your customers are.
Do this this week
Open your own website and try to complete your main action - book, order, or send the contact form - using only the Tab and Enter keys. No mouse. If you get stuck, note exactly where. Then view the page and check two things: does every meaningful image have alt text, and does every form field have a visible label. Those three checks take twenty minutes, need no tools, and will find most of what is actually wrong. Fix what they surface before you consider spending a dollar on anything else.