AODA web and document accessibility for Ontario municipalities: council agendas, by-laws, forms, notices and the municipal website itself, to WCAG 2.0 and 2.1 AA — audits, remediation and conformance reporting from an Ontario Vendor of Record.
A municipality’s accessibility obligation is mostly documents
A municipal website is a publishing operation. Every council meeting produces an agenda, reports, minutes and by-laws; every department produces forms, notices and consultation material; all of it is web content under Ontario’s Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, and all of it must meet WCAG 2.0 Level AA the day it is posted. The website template is the easier half. The flow of documents is where municipalities most often fall short, and where residents most often meet a barrier.
We work with municipalities on both halves: the site and its applications, audited and remediated to the standard, and the document flow, fixed at the source where possible and remediated on your meeting cycle where not. The City of Toronto is among the organizations we have served. Municipalities file a compliance report every two years; the findings register and monitoring we leave behind are what make the report true.
What a municipality has to get right
Designated public sector obligations, applied to the documents a council produces every week
The website and web content
Designated public sector organizations must make public websites and web content meet WCAG 2.0 Level AA. That includes every PDF the site links to — and municipal sites link to more PDFs than any other kind.
Council and committee material
Agendas, minutes, staff reports and by-laws are published on a schedule that does not wait for remediation. We remediate on your meeting cycle, from your source files, so the accessible version is the one that posts.
Forms, permits and notices
Applications, licences, public notices and consultation material — the documents residents must be able to complete, not merely read.
Compliance reporting every two years
Municipalities file an accessibility compliance report every two years. An audit is how you answer the web questions truthfully, and the register you keep is what you show if asked.
Accessibility plans and advisory committees
Multi-year accessibility plans and the municipal accessibility advisory committees that review them need progress they can point to. Findings registers and monitoring dashboards give them exactly that.
Procurement
We are an Ontario Vendor of Record for I&IT solutions consulting, which many municipalities and their agencies can use to engage us without a full procurement.
Questions we're asked
Do PDFs really have to be accessible, or just the web pages?
The requirement covers web content, and a document published on the website is web content. Council agendas, reports and forms are usually the material residents actually need, and the material most often inaccessible. Ontario’s own guidance is explicit that documents posted on the site are in scope.
We post dozens of documents a week. Is that remediable?
Yes, and the answer is a process rather than a project: templates and authoring practices that produce accessible documents at the source, remediation of the ones that still need it on your meeting cycle, and monitoring that tells you when something slips. The document remediation page explains both halves.
Can you work with our agenda-management or website vendor?
Yes. We work alongside the platforms municipalities already run, remediating what they output and telling you, specifically, what the platform itself must change. Where a vendor claims a platform is compliant, we test the claim.