What does WCAG 2.0 AA mean for an Ontario business?

What the standard is asking for

The four principles behind it are that a site should be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. In practice that means a visitor who cannot see the screen, cannot use a mouse, or is reading on a phone in bright sunlight can still find the phone number, complete the form, and understand what the business does.

The failures that show up most

WebAIM scans a million home pages every year, and the same problems sit at the top of the list: light grey text on a white background that fails contrast, images carrying real information with no text alternative, form fields with no label once the placeholder text disappears, and links or buttons with no text a screen reader can announce.

Two more are harder for a scanner to catch. Menus and sliders that cannot be reached with the keyboard alone, and a page that is one long run of styled text with no real headings, which leaves a screen reader user no way to skim.

Two carve-outs worth knowing

Ontario's regulation excludes two of the WCAG criteria: 1.2.4, live captions on streamed video, and 1.2.5, audio description for pre-recorded video. Everything else at Level A and AA applies. The regulation also points at WCAG 2.0 specifically, even though 2.1 and 2.2 now exist.

Building to a newer version satisfies the older one. The W3C says content that conforms to 2.1 also conforms to 2.0, and 2.2 keeps that promise apart from one retired parsing criterion, which the W3C now treats as always met by HTML.