The BC Accessibility Act: what it means for your website

What is the Accessible British Columbia Act?

The Accessible British Columbia Act (SBC 2021, c.19) received Royal Assent in June 2021 and came into force in September 2022. It is BC's framework legislation for accessibility — meaning it establishes the structure, principles, and obligations, with specific technical standards to follow through regulations over time.

The Act is modelled in part on Ontario's Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA), which has been in force since 2005. AODA is more mature — it has sector-specific standards with hard deadlines that have already passed for most private sector organisations. BC's Act is newer and the standards pipeline is still developing, which is part of why many BC businesses have not yet felt its direct impact.

The core intent of the Act is to make BC the most accessible province in Canada by 2024 — a target the province set for itself. Whether that target is being met is a separate debate, but the direction is clear: accessibility is being treated as a legal obligation, not a nice-to-have.

Who it applies to — and the phased rollout

The Act uses a phased approach. Not all organisations were covered from day one.

Phase 1 — public sector (in force now): BC government ministries, Crown corporations, public post-secondary institutions, school districts, health authorities, and similar public bodies are already required to comply. They must have an accessibility committee, publish an accessibility plan, and establish a feedback process.

Phase 2 — broader public sector and large private organisations: The regulations expanding obligations to larger private sector organisations have been in development. Organisations above a certain size threshold are expected to face similar requirements — accessibility committees, plans, and feedback mechanisms — as the regulatory framework matures.

Phase 3 — small and medium private sector: Smaller private businesses are further down the timeline. Specific obligations, deadlines, and technical standards for this group are still being developed through regulation.

If you run a small business in BC, you are not yet subject to the Act's specific procedural requirements. But — and this is the part most people miss — you are already subject to the BC Human Rights Code, and that changes the picture significantly.

What the Act actually requires organisations to do

For organisations currently in scope, the Act creates three core obligations.

Establish an accessibility committee. The organisation must create a committee that includes people with disabilities. The committee's role is to advise on the development and implementation of the accessibility plan. This is a meaningful requirement — it is not just a paper exercise, and the committee must genuinely include disabled people, not just able-bodied people guessing at what accessibility means.

Develop and publish an accessibility plan. The organisation must create a written plan that identifies barriers to accessibility and sets out how those barriers will be removed and prevented. The plan must be published — meaning publicly available — and updated at least every three years.

Establish a feedback process. There must be a mechanism for people to provide feedback about the organisation's accessibility, and the organisation must respond to that feedback. This feedback process must also be accessible — you cannot make it accessible only by phone if that excludes deaf users, for example.

For websites specifically: the Act does not yet prescribe a specific technical standard (like WCAG 2.1 Level AA) for private sector organisations. But the requirement to identify and remove barriers to accessibility clearly encompasses digital barriers — including websites that cannot be used with a screen reader, that have insufficient colour contrast, or that require a mouse to navigate.

The BC Human Rights Code: the law that already applies

Here is what most discussions of the BC Accessibility Act leave out: the BC Human Rights Code (RSBC 1996, c.210) has been in force for decades and already protects people with disabilities from discrimination in services, accommodation, and employment.

Section 8 of the Code prohibits discrimination in a service or facility customarily available to the public based on a protected characteristic, which includes physical and mental disability. Courts and tribunals have consistently found that websites are services within the meaning of human rights legislation.

This means a person with a visual impairment, a motor disability, or a cognitive disability who cannot use your website has grounds to file a human rights complaint against your business — right now, regardless of whether the Accessible BC Act applies to you yet. They do not need to wait for regulations. The Code is already there.

Complaints under the Code go to the BC Human Rights Tribunal. Remedies can include requiring the business to remove the barrier, compensation for injury to dignity, and public interest remedies. There is no cap on compensation for injury to dignity under the Code.

This is not hypothetical. Human rights complaints about inaccessible websites have been filed and upheld across Canada. The legal risk is real even for small businesses.

How WCAG connects to BC accessibility law

WCAG — the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines — is the international technical standard for web accessibility produced by the W3C. It is not a BC law, but it is the standard BC government websites are required to meet, and it is the benchmark tribunals and courts across Canada use to assess whether a website is accessible or not.

WCAG 2.1 Level AA is the current expected minimum for any website that needs to demonstrate accessibility compliance in Canada. Level AA covers the most common and significant barriers: sufficient colour contrast, keyboard navigability, text alternatives for images, captions for video, form labels, and readable page structure.

If your website meets WCAG 2.1 Level AA, you are in a strong position to demonstrate that you have taken your accessibility obligations seriously — both under any future Accessible BC Act regulations and in response to a Human Rights Code complaint. If your website does not meet it, you are exposed.

WCAG 2.2 was published in 2023 and adds further criteria, particularly around mobile and touch accessibility. The jump from 2.1 to 2.2 AA is not dramatic — if you have done 2.1 AA properly, you are most of the way there.

How BC compares to Ontario's AODA

Ontario's AODA is the most mature provincial accessibility legislation in Canada and gives a useful picture of where BC is headed.

Under AODA's Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation, private sector organisations with 50 or more employees have been required to meet WCAG 2.0 Level AA for their websites since January 2021. Small organisations (fewer than 50 employees) were required to meet Level A by 2014 and Level AA by 2021, with some exceptions for existing content.

Ontario enforces compliance through audits and can issue administrative monetary penalties. The AODA Commissioner's office has enforcement powers that BC's framework has not yet fully replicated in the private sector.

BC is roughly a decade behind Ontario in the maturity of its enforcement framework, but the direction is the same. BC businesses watching what happened in Ontario — where human rights complaints about websites increased substantially as awareness of AODA grew — should not wait for equivalent BC regulations before acting.

What BC businesses should do now

You do not need to wait for regulations that specifically name your type of organisation. The practical steps are the same regardless of where the timeline sits.

Audit your current website against WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Free automated tools like WAVE (wave.webaim.org) and axe DevTools will catch common failures — colour contrast, missing alt text, unlabelled form fields, missing language declaration. Automated tools catch roughly 30–40% of real accessibility issues; the rest require manual testing, including keyboard-only navigation and screen reader testing.

Fix the failures you find. Prioritise issues that prevent access entirely — a contact form that cannot be submitted with a keyboard, a PDF that has no text layer, a page that cannot be navigated by screen reader. These are the failures most likely to generate a complaint.

Publish an accessibility statement. A plain-language page on your website that describes your accessibility commitment, the standard you are working toward, known limitations, and how to contact you if someone encounters a barrier. This demonstrates good faith and gives users a way to report problems before filing a complaint.

Build accessibility in from the start for any new site or redesign. Retrofitting accessibility onto an inaccessible site is significantly more expensive than building it in correctly from the beginning. If you are commissioning a new website, require WCAG 2.1 Level AA compliance in writing as part of the contract.

Test with real users where possible. Automated tools and checklists are a starting point, not an endpoint. If you can get feedback from someone who uses a screen reader, who navigates by keyboard only, or who has low vision, that feedback is more valuable than any automated report.

A note from a low vision perspective

I am low vision. I use the web every day, and I notice inaccessible websites immediately — not as a compliance exercise, but because they actively prevent me from doing what I came to do. Small colour contrast failures, tiny text that cannot be resized, buttons that are too small to click reliably, pages that break when I zoom in — these are not abstract technical criteria. They are barriers that cost time and cause frustration, every single day.

The businesses that build accessible websites are not doing it because a law told them to. They are doing it because they understand that about one in five Canadians lives with a disability, and that designing for accessibility almost always produces a better experience for everyone — not just the people who need it most.

Larger text, better contrast, keyboard navigation, clear structure — every one of these benefits people on mobile, people in bright sunlight, people who are distracted, people who are ageing. Accessibility is not a special accommodation. It is good design.