What the Accessible BC Act actually is
The Accessible British Columbia Act received royal assent in June 2021. The first thing to understand about it is that it is framework legislation — a law that creates the machinery for making accessibility rules, rather than a law that contains the rules themselves. It establishes who can be regulated, how standards get developed, who advises on them, and what enforcement can eventually look like. The specific obligations arrive later, standard by standard, through regulation.
This is why a BC business owner who goes looking for "the website rules" in the Act comes back confused. They are not there yet. The Act creates a Provincial Accessibility Committee to advise government, empowers cabinet to designate which organizations are covered, and authorizes the development of accessibility standards in areas like employment, service delivery, the built environment — and information and communications, which is where websites live.
If this structure sounds familiar, it should. It is closely modelled on Ontario's AODA, which took the same approach fifteen years earlier: pass the framework first, phase in the standards over years, starting with the public sector and expanding outward. That precedent matters a great deal for predicting what happens next, and we will come back to it.
Who it covers right now (probably not you)
The first organizations designated under the Act were public sector bodies — government ministries, municipalities, school districts, health authorities, universities and colleges, and similar organizations. Several hundred of them are now required to establish an accessibility committee, publish an accessibility plan, and provide a mechanism for receiving feedback about accessibility barriers.
Notice what those first obligations are: committees, plans, and feedback channels. Not technical web standards. Even for the public bodies covered today, the Act's initial phase is about building organizational accountability, not about auditing code. A private business in BC — a restaurant in Nanaimo, a law office in Victoria, an online store in Kelowna — currently has no direct obligations under the Accessible BC Act.
As of this writing, the technical standards — including any web accessibility standard — are still being developed through the committee process. That is the honest current state: the machinery exists, the public sector is in the system, and the standards that will eventually reach private businesses are in the pipeline but not yet law.
How the web standards will arrive
The Act allows government to adopt standards by regulation, and everything about how accessibility standards have developed in Canada — federally under the Accessible Canada Act, provincially under the AODA — points to the same destination for web content: WCAG, at Level AA. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are the international standard; every Canadian regulator that has addressed websites has referenced them; there is no plausible scenario where BC invents a different technical yardstick.
The open questions are not what the standard will be, but who it will apply to and when. Ontario's answer was a phased rollout by organization size — public sector first, then large private organizations, with a 50-employee threshold for the private-sector web requirements. BC may draw its lines differently, but the shape of the rollout — public first, bigger before smaller, years of notice before enforcement — is the well-worn Canadian path.
For a small BC business, the realistic reading is this: you will probably not wake up next year to a legal requirement with your name on it. But the direction is one-way. Accessibility legislation in Canada has only ever expanded — new jurisdictions, lower thresholds, more sectors. Planning on the basis that it will never reach you is a bet against every precedent we have.
Ontario already ran this experiment
The AODA is the closest thing we have to a preview of BC's future, and its lessons are worth taking seriously.
First lesson: the deadlines arrive faster than organizations prepare for them. Ontario businesses had years of notice that WCAG 2.0 AA requirements were coming for websites, and a large share still scrambled at the deadline — paying rush rates for remediation that would have cost far less as part of a normal redesign cycle. A website is typically rebuilt every three to five years anyway; the businesses that came out fine were the ones that simply folded accessibility into their next scheduled rebuild.
Second lesson: retrofitting is the expensive path. Accessibility added at design time costs little — it is mostly a matter of doing things properly rather than doing extra things. Accessibility bolted onto a finished site built without it can mean reworking templates, colour systems, navigation, and forms. The AODA years produced an entire cottage industry of costly retrofits, and an equally regrettable industry of "compliance overlay" widgets that promised a shortcut and delivered a product that makes sites worse for actual assistive-technology users.
Third lesson: the standard is completely knowable in advance. Nobody in BC needs to wait to find out what will be required. WCAG 2.1 Level AA is published, stable, testable, and free to read. A BC business that meets it today has, in all likelihood, already met whatever the province eventually requires — years early, at its own pace, on its own budget.
The part that applies to you today: human rights law
Here is the piece most "is my website legal" discussions miss entirely. The absence of a specific web standard under the Accessible BC Act does not mean BC businesses have no accessibility obligations. The BC Human Rights Code prohibits discrimination in services customarily available to the public, and disability is a protected ground. Canadian human rights tribunals have long treated inaccessible services as potential discrimination — and a website is, increasingly, the front door of a service.
This is not a theoretical stretch. The landmark federal case in this space — a blind woman's decade-long fight over government websites she could not use with a screen reader — established back in 2010 that inaccessible websites can violate equality rights. Human rights complaints do not wait for accessibility statutes; they proceed under laws that have existed for decades.
For a small business, the practical significance is not that a tribunal complaint is likely — it is that "there's no law yet" was never quite true. The obligation to serve customers with disabilities without discrimination exists now. A systematic, good-faith effort toward the recognized standard, honestly documented, is both the decent position and the defensible one.
What a BC business should actually do now
Not panic, and not nothing. The sensible middle has four parts.
Adopt WCAG 2.1 AA as your working standard now — not because a regulation forces you to, but because it is where every road leads: the future BC standard, the existing human rights baseline, the federal direction, and plain good service to the more than one in four Canadians with a disability. If your website is due for a rebuild in the next couple of years, make AA conformance a written requirement of that project. It costs dramatically less specified up front than retrofitted later.
Find out where you stand. You cannot prioritize what you have not measured. An audit against WCAG 2.1 AA — covering keyboard access, contrast, structure, forms, and assistive-technology behaviour — turns a vague worry into a concrete, ranked to-do list. Free automated tools like WAVE will surface the obvious problems; a manual audit finds the majority that automation misses.
Publish an accessibility statement. A plain page saying what standard you aim for, honestly noting known limitations, and giving people a direct way to reach you when something does not work. It mirrors the feedback-mechanism obligation the Act already places on public bodies — which is a strong hint about what regulators consider baseline good practice — and it signals to every visitor that you take all of your customers seriously.
Fix in priority order, on your own schedule. Accessibility work ranks naturally: barriers that lock people out entirely (keyboard traps, unlabelled forms, missing alt text on functional images) come first; friction (weak contrast, vague link text) second; refinements last. A business that fixes steadily, release by release, will be comfortably ahead of any plausible regulatory timeline — without ever having an "accessibility crisis" line item.
Getting started without drowning
If you own a BC business website and this is all new, here is the honest, minimal path. Spend one hour this month: tab through your site with only a keyboard, run your homepage through WAVE, and check your body-text contrast with the WebAIM Contrast Checker. Write down what you find. You now know more about your site's accessibility than most Canadian business owners ever learn about theirs.
Then make one decision: either hand the findings to whoever maintains your site with instructions to fix the worst of it, or get a professional audit and a proper prioritized plan. Either way, when British Columbia's web accessibility standard eventually lands — and it will — it should be a non-event for you. The businesses that will feel it are the ones treating "not required yet" as "never." Don't be one of them.