Accessibility and My Website: What You Should Know
Website accessibility can sound highly technical, particularly when terms such as AODA and WCAG enter the conversation.
The underlying idea is much simpler: people should be able to use your website regardless of how they access it or what barriers they may experience.
This includes people who navigate with a keyboard, use a screen reader, enlarge text, have difficulty distinguishing colours, or need captions to understand video content.
Understanding a few basic principles can help you evaluate your website and decide whether it needs a closer examination.
What Is AODA?
AODA stands for the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act.
It is an Ontario law intended to identify, remove, and prevent barriers for people with disabilities. It covers several areas of everyday life, including customer service, employment, transportation, public spaces, and access to information and communications.
Websites fall within the information and communications area.
When website accessibility is discussed in relation to AODA, you will often also hear the term Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG.
WCAG is an internationally recognized set of guidelines developed by the World Wide Web Consortium. These guidelines explain how websites and other digital content can be made more accessible to people with different disabilities.
AODA is the Ontario framework. WCAG provides the technical guidance commonly used to evaluate websites.
What Does an Accessible Website Look Like?
An accessible website does not necessarily look different from any other well-designed website.
Accessibility is often found in how the website is structured and how it behaves.
For example, visitors should be able to:
- Navigate the website using only a keyboard.
- See which link, button, or field currently has keyboard focus.
- Read text with sufficient colour contrast against its background.
- Enlarge the page without losing information or functionality.
- Understand images through appropriate alternative text when needed.
- Use forms with clear labels, instructions, and error messages.
- Follow a logical heading structure.
- Pause or control moving or automatically playing content.
- Access captions or alternatives for important audio and video.
- Use the website on different screen sizes and orientations.
Many of these features also improve the experience for visitors without disabilities. Clear navigation, readable text, useful form instructions, and predictable layouts benefit almost everyone.
Should My Website Be Accessible?
Even when legal requirements are not the focus, accessibility is worth considering.
A website is often the first place someone goes to learn about a business, compare services, request information, make a purchase, or find contact details. If the website creates barriers, some visitors may be unable to complete those tasks.
Accessibility can also support broader business goals by improving:
- Usability across different devices and input methods.
- Content structure and clarity.
- Customer access to important information.
- Compatibility with current and future technologies.
- The overall quality and reliability of the website.
Accessibility should not be treated as a feature that is added only for a small group of visitors. It is part of building a website that works for a wider range of people and situations.
How Do I Know Whether My Website Is Accessibility-Friendly?
You can begin with a few simple checks.
Try navigating the website without using a mouse. Use the Tab key to move between links, buttons, menus, and form fields. Check whether you can see where you are on the page and whether every interactive feature can be used from the keyboard.
Increase your browser zoom to 200%. The content should remain readable without text being cut off, overlapping, or disappearing.
Review your pages for:
- Low-contrast text.
- Images containing important text.
- Videos without captions.
- Links with vague wording such as “click here.”
- Forms without visible labels.
- Instructions that rely only on colour.
- Automatically moving or playing content.
- Headings chosen mainly for their appearance rather than their structure.
These checks will not provide a complete accessibility evaluation, but they can reveal obvious barriers.
The World Wide Web Consortium’s Easy Checks guide (opens in a new tab) provides additional steps for conducting an initial review.
Can I Test My Website for Free?
Yes. Free automated accessibility tools can provide a useful starting point.
These tools can identify certain technical issues, including:
- Missing alternative-text attributes.
- Some colour-contrast failures.
- Empty links or buttons.
- Missing form labels.
- Certain heading and page-structure problems.
- Some incorrect uses of accessible markup.
Running one or more automated tools is a reasonable way to find common issues quickly.
However, a tool can only evaluate conditions that can be reliably detected through software. It may determine that an image has alternative text, for example, but it cannot always determine whether that text accurately explains the image’s purpose.
It may confirm that a button exists in the page code without determining whether someone can successfully find, understand, and operate it using a keyboard or assistive technology.
The World Wide Web Consortium explains that automated tools can assist with accessibility evaluation, but no tool alone can determine whether a website is accessible (opens in a new tab). Human judgment and manual testing are still required.
A clean automated result therefore means that the tool did not detect the problems it was designed to find. It does not mean that the website has no accessibility barriers.
Why Pay for a Comprehensive Accessibility Assessment?
A free scan answers a limited but useful question:
What accessibility problems can this tool detect automatically?
A comprehensive assessment asks a broader question:
Can people with different needs successfully use this website?
A thorough assessment normally combines automated scanning with structured manual testing. Depending on the website, this may include:
- Keyboard navigation and focus testing.
- Page zoom, text spacing, and mobile reflow testing.
- Review of headings, landmarks, links, images, forms, and error messages.
- Testing of menus, dialogs, carousels, and other interactive components.
- Review of video, audio, documents, and downloadable content.
- Examination of representative pages and repeated page templates.
- Testing with assistive technologies where appropriate.
- Manual interpretation of the relevant WCAG criteria.
The assessment should also explain what was tested, what barriers were found, who may be affected, and what should be addressed first.
That context is important. A long list of technical errors is not particularly useful if the website owner cannot determine which problems are genuine, how they affect visitors, or how they should be corrected.
Is a Comprehensive Assessment Always Necessary?
Not necessarily.
A free automated scan may be enough when you are performing an early check, reviewing a small change, or looking for obvious problems during development.
A more comprehensive assessment becomes valuable when:
- The website has never received a structured accessibility review.
- It contains forms, online services, accounts, purchases, or other important interactions.
- It has been redesigned or significantly changed.
- Automated tools produce results that are difficult to interpret.
- Visitors have reported accessibility problems.
- The organization needs a documented understanding of the website’s barriers.
- Development work needs to be prioritized before remediation begins.
The right level of testing depends on the website’s size, complexity, audience, and purpose.
Accessibility Is an Ongoing Process
A website can become less accessible over time even if it was originally built carefully.
New pages, images, videos, forms, third-party tools, plugins, and design changes can introduce new barriers. Content editors may also unintentionally remove headings, add unsuitable alternative text, or publish documents that are difficult to use.
Accessibility is therefore better treated as an ongoing part of website management rather than a one-time test.
Automated checks can help catch common problems during regular updates. Periodic manual reviews can examine the issues software cannot reliably assess.
The objective is not simply to receive a perfect score from a testing tool. It is to understand how people use the website, identify meaningful barriers, and improve the experience in a practical and organized way.