Laws and Government Standards

Accessible Canada Act (ACA)

The Accessible Canada Act came into effect on July 11, 2019. The purpose includes identifying, removing and preventing barriers in 7 key areas:

  • Service Design and Delivery
  • Built Environment
  • Employment
  • Information and Communication Technologies
  • Communications
  • Transportation
  • Procurement

The goals of ACA include the realization of a barrier-free Canada, culture change, standards development, proactive compliance and enforcement measures, monitoring and oversight.

ACA applies to federally regulated entities including, Government of Canada’s departments and agencies, Crown corporations, Parliament and Federally-regulated private sector.

Requirements include publishing accessibility plans, feedback processes and progress reports.

The Accessibility Standards Canada (ASC) / Canadian Accessibility Standards Development Organization (CASDO) will form technical committees to develop Accessibility Standards in the 7 key areas. These committees will include experts, persons with disability and industry representatives.

Accessibility Standards will be posted online for public comment. The Final Standards will be submitted to the Minister to be adopted into regulations.

Government of Canada

The Government of Canada Standard of Web Accessibility was developed to ensure the uniform application of a high level of web accessibility across Government of Canada public facing websites and web applications.

The Government of Canada Standard on Web Accessibility will soon be deprecated. It will be replaced by the upcoming ICT Accessibility Standard. The new ICT Accessibility Standard states that public-facing and internal-facing web content must meet the EN 301 549 (European Standard for Digital Accessibility).

EN 301 549 is updated to adopt the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 (level AA) for web content, electronic documents, and non-web software.

The Guideline on Making Information Technology Usable by All also requires that web content conform to EN 301 549 and WCAG 2.1 level AA.

The ESDC IT Accessibility Office is leading the Accessibility Compliance Project (ACP) to ensure compliance of internally used websites and applications. The target conformance level is also WCAG 2.1 AA.

Back to top