Web and document accessibility for Ontario colleges, universities, school boards and education agencies: course material, student services, portals and public websites to WCAG 2.0 and 2.1 AA, with audits, remediation and conformance reporting from a firm that has delivered for HEQCO.
Accessibility in education is a supply problem
An institution publishes more content in a term than most organizations do in a decade, most of it written by people whose job is teaching rather than publishing. The public website is the smaller part of the obligation. The larger part is the course material, the services a student cannot avoid, and the learning platform in between — and the answer to all three is process: templates that export accessible documents, authors who know the ten habits that matter, monitoring that catches the rest, and a remediation service for what students actually request.
Colleges, universities and school boards are designated public sector organizations under Ontario’s regulation, with WCAG 2.0 AA obligations for their public web content and a compliance report every two years. We have delivered for the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario, and the whole practice — audit, remediation, documents, conformance reporting, monitoring — is available through the Ontario Vendor of Record supply arrangement.
What education has to get right
Public-sector obligations, and a duty to accommodate that reaches into every course
Course and learning material
Slides, readings, problem sets and recorded lectures — the content students meet every day, and the content most often produced by people with no accessibility training. We fix the templates and train the authors.
Student-facing services
Applications, registration, financial aid, accommodation requests — the journeys a student cannot avoid, audited with assistive technology end to end.
Learning management systems
The platform is the vendor’s; the content and the configuration are yours. We audit both and separate, precisely, what you can fix from what the vendor must.
Public websites
Designated public sector obligations: WCAG 2.0 AA for the institution’s public sites and content, compliance reports every two years.
Research and policy publishing
Reports, data releases and knowledge products — the work we delivered for the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario — accessible without losing the figures.
Procurement
Colleges, universities and school boards in the broader public sector can engage us through the Ontario Vendor of Record supply arrangement.
Questions we're asked
Which obligations apply to a college, a university or a school board?
All three are designated public sector organizations under Ontario’s regulation: WCAG 2.0 Level AA for public websites and web content, a compliance report every two years, and the educational and training resources provisions of the Information and Communications Standards. Alongside the regulation, the duty to accommodate under the Human Rights Code reaches every course and every service.
Our faculty produce thousands of documents a term. What is realistic?
A process, not a heroic remediation. Accessible templates for slides and documents, an export that produces tagged PDFs, short training for authors, monitoring that catches the worst, and a remediation service for the material students actually request. That is what makes accessibility sustainable at scale.
Can you audit our learning management system?
Yes — the configuration, the themes and the content, with the platform’s own conformance report read against what it actually does. The report separates what your team can change from what the vendor must, which is the distinction a procurement conversation needs.