Ontario organisations with fifty or more employees have had to meet WCAG 2.0 Level AA for public websites and web content since 2021 under the AODA. The standard cites WCAG 2.0, but courts, procurement teams and your own users do not stop at 2.0, and building to the current version, 2.2, is both safer and barely more work when it is planned from the first wireframe.
What 2.2 adds
Nine new success criteria, of which six are at Level AA. The ones that change day-to-day product work: focus must not be hidden behind sticky headers or overlays (Focus Not Obscured); interactive targets need at least 24 by 24 CSS pixels of space (Target Size Minimum); anything you can drag must also be doable with a click or a keypress (Dragging Movements); users should not have to re-enter information they already gave you in the same flow (Redundant Entry); and login must not depend on remembering or transcribing something, so password managers and passkeys must work (Accessible Authentication).
What this means in practice
Design the sticky navigation with a scroll margin so focused elements land below it. Set a minimum size for icon buttons in the design system once. Give every drag interaction a button alternative. Prefill the review step from earlier steps. Allow paste in every password field and support autocomplete attributes.
None of these are expensive. All of them are expensive to retrofit after a design system has shipped without them, which is why they are part of our component library rather than an audit item.
How we test
Automated checks in CI catch roughly a third of issues. The rest come from a keyboard-only pass of every flow, a screen-reader pass with VoiceOver and NVDA, and at least one usability session with a participant who uses assistive technology. The findings go in the same backlog as any other bug, with the same priority rules.