Accessibility stops being a best practice the moment it appears in a bid document. In Ottawa, where a large share of buyers are federal departments, Crown corporations, the City, school boards, hospitals and the suppliers who serve them, it appears in bid documents regularly.

Two things follow. Your own website is read as evidence of how you work. And any digital thing you deliver — a portal, a report, a training module, a PDF — may have to conform, with your signature attesting to it.

Who is actually asking

Federal departments and agencies. Federal web content follows government standards built on WCAG, and the Accessible Canada Act sets a direction toward a barrier-free federal jurisdiction. If you deliver a digital product that ends up on a federal site or in front of federal employees, conformance is a delivery requirement.

Federally regulated organisations. Banks, telecoms, airlines, interprovincial transport and broadcasters fall under the Accessible Canada Act, and they push requirements down to suppliers.

The City of Ottawa, school boards, hospitals, universities and colleges. Ontario public sector organisations, which puts them inside the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act and its Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation.

Prime contractors with public sector contracts. The requirement propagates: a prime bound by an accessibility clause binds its subcontractors with the same clause.

Nonprofits with government funders. Funding agreements increasingly carry accessibility conditions for anything public-facing; we cover that side in our guide to nonprofit websites in Ottawa.

What the obligation actually is

AODA, in Ontario. The Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation requires public sector organisations and private or nonprofit organisations with 50 or more employees to make their websites and web content conform to WCAG 2.0 Level AA, with published exceptions for live captioning and pre-recorded audio descriptions. Organisations with 20 or more employees also file a periodic accessibility compliance report. Note the version: AODA's text names 2.0 AA while most procurement documents now reference 2.1 AA or 2.2 AA.

The Accessible Canada Act, federally. Federally regulated entities publish accessibility plans, establish feedback processes and report on progress. The Act sets up the regime; the operational web standard in practice is WCAG at Level AA.

EN 301 549. This European ICT standard appears in Canadian procurement text because it packages WCAG together with requirements for software, documents, hardware and support services. If a bid references it, read the clauses on documentation and support, which go beyond web pages.

The practical takeaway: a single target of WCAG 2.2 Level AA satisfies nearly everything you will be asked for, and the gap from 2.1 AA is small enough that aiming at the newer one costs almost nothing.

What buyers ask you to produce

This is where unprepared suppliers lose time during a bid window.

An accessibility conformance report. Usually a VPAT, the Voluntary Product Accessibility Template, completed against WCAG and sometimes EN 301 549. It is a per-criterion statement of Supports, Partially Supports, or Does Not Support, with notes. A VPAT filled in as "Supports" across the board with no notes reads as unexamined, and reviewers treat it that way. An honest report with a few "Partially Supports" entries and a remediation note is more credible and usually scores better.

A statement about your own website. Some RFPs ask directly whether your corporate site conforms. Others simply have an evaluator open it. Either way, a bid for accessibility-sensitive work from a firm whose own site fails a keyboard test is a problem you created for yourself.

Named responsibility and a feedback mechanism. A published accessibility statement with a contact route for reporting barriers, and a documented process for responding. Cheap, and frequently missing.

Testing evidence. Which tools, which assistive technologies, whether any testing involved people with disabilities. Automated scanning alone does not demonstrate conformance and experienced reviewers know it.

Accessible deliverables, including documents. If you hand over PDFs, reports or slide decks, those have to be accessible too — tagged structure, reading order, alt text, real tables. This clause surprises more suppliers than any other on the list.

Prepare before the bid window

Bid windows are short. Everything below takes weeks and cannot be compressed into the three days before a submission is due.

Audit your own site against WCAG 2.2 AA. Combine a scanner with manual testing: keyboard-only navigation of every interactive element, a screen reader pass over your main pages, colour contrast on actual text, and forms tested for labels and error messaging.
Fix the issues that break tasks first. A form that cannot be completed by keyboard, a menu that traps focus, informative images with no text alternative, video with no captions. Those block a person outright; decorative contrast issues matter less.
Write the accessibility statement. The standard you target, the current state honestly, known exceptions, how to report a barrier, and when it was last reviewed. Keep the date current.
Complete a VPAT for anything you sell as a product. Have a second person review it. If you cannot defend a line under questioning, change it.
Make accessibility part of the build rather than an audit at the end. Semantic HTML, labelled form controls, visible focus indicators, headings in order, contrast checked during design. The general case is covered in our post on website accessibility for Canadian small businesses.
Sort out your document workflow. Decide who produces accessible PDFs and how they are checked, before a deliverable is due.
Keep the evidence. Audit reports, remediation records, test notes, training records. Procurement rewards documentation, and so does any complaint process.

The commercial case, stated plainly

Accessibility work on a well-built site is inexpensive. On a site built without it, the same work is a rebuild. The cost difference between those two paths is the entire argument.

Conformance work also produces side effects worth having: heading structure and text alternatives help search engines read your pages, keyboard support and clear focus states make a site faster for everyone, and a site that excludes people with disabilities is excluding customers.

There is exposure too. Public sector buyers do reject bids on accessibility grounds, Ontario's compliance reporting regime carries enforcement powers, and a supplier who attested to conformance and then fails a review has a contractual problem rather than a technical one.

If you are starting from behind

Keyboard and screen reader test your own site this week. The findings will be uncomfortable and they are the baseline.
Fix blocking failures on the pages a buyer will visit: home, services, about, contact.
Publish the accessibility statement, honestly.
Put WCAG 2.2 AA into the specification for your next build so it is a requirement rather than a request.
Build the document workflow, then work through the remaining criteria on a schedule you can report against.

We build to WCAG 2.2 AA by default on web development projects in Ottawa, keyboard and screen reader testing included, because for a supplier selling into this market it is the part of the build with the clearest commercial return. If you are facing a bid requirement and want to know where your site stands, send us the URL.

Common questions

Does AODA apply to my small business?

The web content requirement applies to public sector organisations and to private or nonprofit organisations with 50 or more employees. A smaller business has other AODA obligations, such as accessible customer service and employment practices, with the WCAG web requirement tied to those thresholds. Procurement is separate: a buyer can require conformance from a supplier of any size as a contract term.

Can an accessibility overlay widget make my site compliant?

No. Overlay tools that inject a toolbar or attempt automated remediation do not produce conformance and are frequently flagged by evaluators and by disability advocates. Fix the underlying markup.

How much of this can automated testing cover?

Scanners reliably catch missing alt text, contrast failures, missing labels and some structural problems. They cannot judge whether an alt text is meaningful, whether focus order makes sense, or whether a task can be completed with a screen reader. Manual testing is what evidence requests are asking about.

Do our PDFs really have to be accessible?

If they are part of a deliverable or published on a covered site, yes. Tagged structure, correct reading order, alt text, real table headers, and text rather than a scanned image. This is the clause most often missed and a common reason a deliverable is sent back.

accessibility as a procurement requirement for ottawa suppliers