For Ontario charities and non-profits
The multi-year accessibility plan is the document the December 31 filing asks about. A great many of them are thorough on premises, service and hiring — and contain no line at all for the website, the intake form, or the donate button.
All three are common, none of them indicate an organization that does not care, and all three are straightforward to answer before the filing.
A multi-year plan written to run through 2025 has now run out. Section 4 of O. Reg. 191/11 asks for it to be reviewed at least once every five years, so a lapsed plan is a live item — and writing the next one is the natural moment to put the website in it for the first time, rather than carrying the same premises-only structure forward by default.
Thorough sections on physical access, accessible customer service, staff training and recruitment. Nothing on the website, the documents published to it, or the forms people are asked to complete. The organization is doing the work and the plan does not say so, which is the version that is easiest to fix.
The threshold is 50 employees, and the count is more specific than most people expect. Full-time, part-time, seasonal and contract workers all count. Volunteers and independent contractors do not. That cuts both ways for a charity: a large volunteer base does not push you over the line, and a roster of part-time and seasonal staff quietly can. Worth establishing before the filing rather than during it.
Rarely the things people expect, and rarely anything that suggests carelessness. These are the findings that recur — no organization is named here, because findings belong to the client who paid for them.
tabindex="1". A well-meant fix that reorders the entire page's tab sequence and makes navigation worse than having no skip link at all.Audits here open with what is already right, and there is usually a lot — complete alt text across a whole photo library is common, and it is the part that takes real discipline to maintain. A report that opens with an accusation gets filed and forgotten.
Registered charities, non-profits and community organizations are quoted 25–35% below the published commercial figures. It is applied by asking for it. There is no form, no proof of hardship, and no separate enquiry process.
Up to 3 page templates
$1,430 – $1,650
Commercially $2,200. Usually the homepage, the intake or donate form, and one program template.
4–8 page templates
$1,625 – $3,375
Commercially $2,500 – $4,500. A full site with its forms and published documents.
9+ templates, or application-heavy
from $3,250
Commercially from $5,000. Client portals, registration systems, anything holding state.
Nothing here is priced below cost, and nothing is charity. The scale bottoms out at a rate that has been the standard rate for this work for years. What changed is that commercial clients stopped being priced as though they were non-profits — so the scale is less a discount than an accurate price for a different buyer.
Where the money is best spent first: for most organizations of this size it is the intake form and the donate path, not the whole site. A focused audit that fixes the two things people actually have to complete is worth more than a comprehensive report nobody has the capacity to act on.
Remediation is quoted separately, once the audit shows what is actually wrong — and where a failure belongs to your platform or theme vendor, the deliverable is the list to hand them rather than an invoice from here.
The audit practice behind this was built on enterprise systems — banking, federal and Ontario government, and health care — where the standard is enforced and the review is adversarial. Twenty years of web work sit behind it, most of the last decade on compliance. Formerly IAAP WAS certified, currently in renewal.
Among the case studies is a multi-year engagement with a social services organization, including a static PDF replaced by a web application their own staff could maintain — AODA compliant by design, and kept that way in-house without a developer. That is usually the outcome worth aiming at here: not a report, but a site the organization can keep accessible on its own budget after the invoice is paid.
If you have 50 or more employees, yes. Section 4 of O. Reg. 191/11 requires large organizations and designated public sector organizations to establish, implement, maintain and document a multi-year accessibility plan, post it publicly, and review it at least once every five years. The employee count is more specific than most people expect: full-time, part-time, seasonal and contract workers all count, while volunteers and independent contractors do not. A large volunteer base will not push a charity over the line, but a roster of part-time and seasonal staff quietly can. Below 50 employees the plan is not required, though the compliance report still is at 20 or more.
It is a good start and it is the part most organizations get right. The gap that shows up repeatedly is that the plan addresses premises, customer service and hiring, and contains no line at all for the website — while the website is now where most people first meet the organization, check whether a program is for them, fill in an intake form, or donate. If the plan has no web row, the honest answer on the filing is harder to write than it needs to be.
Registered charities, non-profits and community organizations are quoted on a sliding scale, typically 25–35% below the published commercial figures. Commercial pricing starts at $2,200 for a focused audit of up to three page templates. The scale reflects what the organization can actually carry, and it is applied by asking, not by making you prove anything.
It changes the tone of the findings, not the standard. Donated and volunteer work is usually well-intentioned and often good, and the failures that turn up in it are structural rather than careless — a theme chosen years ago, a plugin that generates markup nobody reviewed, a form builder that never associated its labels. Where a failure belongs to the platform rather than to your team, that is stated plainly, along with the list to hand the vendor.
Increasingly, yes. Accessibility conformance appears in grant conditions, in United Way and foundation reporting, and in public sector procurement. An audit report with dated findings and a remediation plan is a document you can attach to an application, which is a different kind of value than compliance alone.
Twenty minutes. Bring the multi-year plan if you have one — reading it together is usually enough to see whether the website is a real gap or an already-solved problem that simply isn't written down.
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