In what ways are Canadian accessibility laws enforced?

Canadian Human Rights Act of 1977:

The Canadian Human Rights Act states that there should be equal opportunities for all individuals in life. Also, there should be discrimination that needs to be encouraged based on “national or ethnic origin, race, sex, age, family status, marital status, disability….”

Even though the act was written before the internet era, still few key factors were added. Website accessibility is also given due consideration, as inaccessible websites prevent disabled people from accessing online information and services. The Canada accessibility standards are a testimony.

There is no doubt that this act was done before the Internet era. But, a solid and realistic case can be made based on the assumption that disabled people would not be provided with equal opportunities if inaccessible web content is given due importance.

The implication of Canada accessibility standards:

In 2011, the Standard on Web Accessibility was built to make sure that a high level of Web accessibility is applied equivalently across Web applications and Government of Canada websites. Following are the five conformance requirements that need to be met by Canadian websites and web applications:

1. Full pages: It is not possible to achieve conformance if a specific part of a webpage is excluded

 

2. Conformance Level: Full application of Level AA. One of the key requirements is synchronous captions for all multimedia

 

3. The required support for accessibility: Any functionality or information provided that does not support accessibility must be presented in a way that at least some or all of the aspects are in line with web accessibility.

 

4. Processes should be well-defined: When a process (a specific sequence of steps that are structured in such a way that it can accomplish a certain activity) is presented by a specific web page or a series of web pages, then all these web pages should have a certain level of conformance. These web pages should conform to Canada accessibility standards so that any issues arising due to nonconformity can be resolved accordingly.

 

5. Non-interference: Those technologies that a user does not rely upon and also does not support accessibility can still be used if they do not interfere with the accessibility aspects of the rest of the web pages.