Accessibility Statement20 October. Seventy-two days to 31 December 2026.
The Ontario compliance report is a self-declaration. You tick the boxes yourself, nobody verifies anything at the moment you file, and that is exactly what makes it dangerous. Five answers get written in ten minutes. The evidence behind them is what gets asked for later.
Three situations. One of them is yours.
A) The report is filled in and filed, and nobody has ever assembled the documents behind the answers.
B) You are filling it in now and two of the five answers are educated guesses.
C) You filed in 2023 the same way and nothing has been asked since, so you assume it was fine.
Here are the five answers an inspector checks first, and what is usually missing behind each one.
"Our site meets WCAG 2.0 AA." No test report, no date, no scope. Which pages were tested? Against which version? By whom? A statement with no test behind it is an opinion.
"The policy is published." Published where? If it sits on a page with no link from anywhere, it is not published in any meaningful sense.
"We have a feedback process." An accessible process means a stated channel, a log of what came in, and a reply time. An unmonitored inbox is not a process.
"We count 18 employees." Part-time and seasonal staff count towards the threshold. Contractors and agency staff do not. Most organizations that believe they are under 20 have simply counted the wrong way — and 18 becomes 23 the moment the summer hires are included.
"Multi-year plan: done." Written in 2021 and never looked at since. The plan has to be reviewed at least every five years, and the review has to be visible.
Every yes needs a document behind it. That is the whole test, and it is why the report takes an afternoon when the paperwork exists and three weeks when it does not.
The part that costs us money to say: if you genuinely have fewer than 20 employees in Ontario, none of this applies to you and you should file nothing and buy nothing. And between 20 and 49, the WCAG requirement for your website does not apply at all — the report, the policies, the training records and the feedback process do. Count first.
Write A, B or C in the comments. I read every one and answer personally with which of the five would be the weakest in your case.
Then send this to whoever ticked the boxes last time. They will recognise at least two.
