Does AODA Actually Apply to My Business?

The honest answer is that it depends, but it depends on things you can actually pin down. Let's pin them down.

Do you operate in Ontario?

AODAAccessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act is Ontario law. It applies to organizations that provide goods, services, or facilities in Ontario and have at least one employee in the province. If your business lives entirely in another province, AODA specifically isn't your law, though similar rules are spreading in Manitoba and through a federal standard for federally regulated organizations. So not Ontario doesn't mean no rules anywhere. One thing to be clear about before the next question: that is the AODA as a whole. The website requirement sitting inside it is much narrower, and whether it reaches you comes down to your headcount.

How many employees do you have?

This is the number that matters most for the website requirement. Count full time, part time, seasonal, and contract staff. You generally don't count volunteers or independent contractors.

• Fewer than 20 employees: You still have AODAAccessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act duties, accessible customer service and providing information in accessible formats when someone asks. You don't file a compliance report, and the WCAGWeb Content Accessibility Guidelines, the technical standard the AODA points at website requirement does not apply to you.
• 20 to 49 employees: You file an accessibility compliance report with the province on schedule and meet the broader standards. The WCAGWeb Content Accessibility Guidelines, the technical standard the AODA points at website requirement still does not apply at this size.
• 50 or more employees: This is the threshold that switches the website standard on. Your public website and web content are expected to meet WCAGWeb Content Accessibility Guidelines, the technical standard the AODA points at 2.0 Level AA, you file compliance reports, and you need a documented multi year accessibility plan.

Is your site public facing?

The web standard is about the site the public can reach. Internal tools, such as an intranet or extranet your staff log into, sit under different and lighter rules. It's your public storefront on the web that's squarely in scope.

When was the deadline?

It already passed. Large organizations were expected to meet WCAGWeb Content Accessibility Guidelines, the technical standard the AODA points at 2.0 Level AA on their websites by January 1, 2021. So if you're at 50 or more employees and your site has never been checked against that standard, you're not getting ahead of a deadline. You're behind one.

If you're under 50, this is the part that matters

A lot of owners get to this point, count nineteen people, and close the tab. Worth staying another minute, because the AODAAccessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act isn't the only law in the room and for a small business it isn't even the important one.

The Ontario Human Rights CodeOntario's human rights law, which applies at any size and has no employee threshold applies at any size. No employee threshold, no filing deadline, no small business exemption. It says you can't deny someone goods, services or facilities because of a disability, and it hands that person something the AODAAccessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act never does: they can file an application against you at the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario themselves. The AODA is a standards and reporting regime the province enforces. The Code is how one customer complains about being shut out. If your website is how people book, buy, or get in touch, and someone with a disability can't use it, the size of your payroll doesn't make that question go away.

There's a second set of rules that ignores headcount too, and it's the one small businesses have usually never looked at. Everything your site collects about a visitor, and every tracker you load to collect it, sits under federal privacy law, PIPEDAPersonal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, Canada's federal privacy law, and under Quebec's Law 25 if you have customers there. Neither has an employee threshold. A five person shop running an analytics script and a Meta pixel is inside those rules exactly the same as a five hundred person one. That's the other lane of the same compliance question, and we audit it in the same pass.

The rules that do not care how many people you employ

If you're sitting just under a threshold, or you're not sure how your headcount is counted, that's worth getting right, because crossing 20 or 50 changes what you file. But don't read a low number as nothing to do. Under 50 the AODAAccessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act web standard is off you and the Human Rights Code and the privacy rules are still on, which is a different job, not an empty one. If you want to know where your own site actually stands on either lane, a first look will tell you.

For the record, we're not lawyers and this isn't legal advice. It's what the regulations say and what we see on real sites. If your headcount sits right on a threshold, or the answer would cost you real money either way, get it from a lawyer.