Website accessibility guidelines: what they ask of a business website

What are the website accessibility guidelines?

WCAG is written by the W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium. Its own summary page, the WCAG 2 Overview, lists three versions in use: WCAG 2.0 from December 2008, 2.1 from June 2018 and 2.2 from October 2023. Later versions add new rules and, with one exception, leave the old ones as they were. The W3C encourages people to use the latest version.

The guidelines are grouped under four principles. Content has to be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust, which in plain terms means a customer can take in what is on the page, work the buttons and forms, make sense of it, and use it with whatever tools they rely on, screen readers included.

Under each guideline sit testable rules called success criteria, at three levels: A, AA and AAA. Level A is the floor and AAA the strictest. Level AA sits between them, and it is the level Ontario’s law names, as you will see below.

For an owner, most of it comes down to ordinary questions. Does every picture that matters have a description? Can someone read the grey text on your white background? Can a customer who uses a keyboard instead of a mouse get to your booking button and see where they are on the way?

How often business websites miss the basics

467 business websites we found advertising on Google, scanned in October 2026. These are sites their owners are paying to send customers to, and the gaps were common:

• Images with no alt text: 22% (105 sites). This was the most common problem we found.
• No main heading on the homepage: 16% (75 sites).
• Do not adapt to a phone: 5%.

Alt text is the description a screen reader reads aloud in place of a picture. We wrote a whole guide to it, what alt text is and how to write it, so we will not repeat it here.

The main heading matters for a different reason. A screen reader user can move through a page by its headings, much as you might skim the bold lines on a flyer. When the homepage has no main heading, there is no clear place where the page says what it is about, and the customer has to listen their way through it instead.

A site that does not adapt to a phone shows the desktop page shrunk down, so the text is tiny until the visitor pinches and zooms. That is awkward for anybody and much harder for someone with poor eyesight. Why a website is not mobile friendly covers the causes.

Three groups of businesses came out worse than the average on these gaps:

• Clinics: images with no alt text on 31% (20 sites).
• Seniors and mobility: no main heading on the homepage on 19% (8 sites), and 12% do not adapt to a phone.
• Urgent services: no main heading on the homepage on 22% (11 sites), and 10% do not adapt to a phone.

The figures for every trade are in what we found in 467 business websites.

Website accessibility standards in Canada

The rules we could confirm on official pages cover some businesses and not others, depending on the province and how the business is regulated. Here is what those pages say, as we read them in October 2026. This is not legal advice.

Ontario and the AODA

The Ontario government’s page “How to make websites accessible” says that as of January 1, 2021, the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) requires all public websites to be accessible for designated public sector organizations, and for businesses and non-profits with 50 or more employees.

The same page sets the standard at WCAG 2.0 Level AA, with two exceptions: live captions (1.2.4) and pre-recorded audio descriptions (1.2.5). It applies to websites and web content published after January 1, 2012. It also says the organization that controls the website must meet the requirements, whether it controls the site directly or through a contract.

The Accessible Canada Act

The federal page “About an Accessible Canada” on canada.ca says the Accessible Canada Act came into force in 2019. It applies to federally regulated entities, and the examples it gives include banking, telecommunications and transportation, Government of Canada departments and agencies, and Crown corporations. If your business is federally regulated, ask a lawyer what the Act means for your website.

British Columbia and elsewhere

British Columbia has its own law, the Accessible British Columbia Act. What it asks of a private business’s website, if anything, is a question for the province’s accessibility pages or a lawyer, and we will not guess at it. The same goes for every other province.

If any of this could apply to you, read the official page yourself and put the specific question to a lawyer. We build websites; we do not give legal opinions.

Website accessibility testing: what a checker can tell you

An automatic website accessibility checker reads the code of a page and flags what it can measure. It can tell that a picture has no alt text, or that grey text is too faint against its background. It cannot tell whether the alt text that is there describes the picture, or whether the page makes sense read aloud from top to bottom.

Ontario’s page makes the same point in its testing tips. It suggests a final automatic assessment, then reviewing the site with assistive technology such as a screen reader, and, where you can, asking people with disabilities to test it before you launch. It also suggests keeping a record of the issues found and fixed.

There are three checks you can do yourself this afternoon, with no tools at all:

1. Put the mouse aside and press the Tab key on your homepage, over and over. A visible outline should move from link to link, and you should be able to reach your phone number and your booking or contact button. If the outline disappears, a keyboard user is lost.
2. Zoom your browser in a few steps. The text should get bigger and wrap onto new lines. If words overlap, or you have to scroll sideways to read a sentence, the page is not coping.
3. Look for pale grey text, text over a busy photo, and anything that relies on colour alone, like a form that turns a box red and says nothing else. Each of those is hard going for a customer with weaker eyesight.

Accessibility on a Droom website

A Droom build does not pass its own checks until every page has exactly one main heading with no skipped heading levels, no picture is missing its alt text (written, or left empty on purpose for a decoration), and body text reaches a contrast ratio of 4.5 to 1, the figure WCAG sets for text at Level AA. The checks also refuse a page that hides the keyboard outline without drawing a replacement, or that ignores a visitor’s setting to reduce motion, and every page is loaded at widths from 320 to 2,560 pixels to make sure nothing spills off the screen.

Those checks cover part of what WCAG asks, not all of it. They are not an accessibility audit and they do not make a site compliant with any law. What they do mean is that the three gaps in the study above cannot reach a page we hand over.

A website is $999 one time for up to five pages, or $1,999 for up to fifteen. Here is what a Droom website includes. If you would rather start with your current site, the free Field Test checks it the way a customer uses it and comes back with a fixed price to fix what fails.