What the AODA Actually Requires for Captions on Your Website

If you have gone looking for a straight answer on whether Ontario law requires you to caption your webinars, you have probably found the same two answers repeated with equal confidence: that the AODA requires captioning on everything, and that live content is exempt. Both are partly right, which is worse than either being wrong.

The requirement sits in the Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation — O. Reg. 191/11, made under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, 2005. It is short, it is specific, and it does not say what most summaries of it say.

The regulation points at WCAG, not at captions

Section 14 does not list captioning requirements. It requires conformance to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines — specifically WCAG 2.0 Level AA, and specifically that version. Not 2.1, not 2.2. Captioning obligations arrive indirectly, through the WCAG success criteria that Level AA happens to include.

That indirection is why so much compliance writing goes wrong. WCAG 2.0 Level AA contains four criteria that touch audio and video:

• 1.2.2 Captions (Pre-recorded) — captions for recorded audio in synchronised media
• 1.2.3 Audio Description or Media Alternative (Pre-recorded)
• 1.2.4 Captions (Live) — captions for live synchronised media
• 1.2.5 Audio Description (Pre-recorded)

Read that list and the obvious conclusion is that Ontario requires live captioning. Section 14 then removes two of them.

The exemption most summaries never mention

Section 14(4), paragraph 2 requires designated public sector organisations and large organisations to meet WCAG 2.0 Level AA by 1 January 2021 — other than success criteria 1.2.4 (Captions – Live) and 1.2.5 (Audio Descriptions – Pre-recorded).

Two things about that are worth being precise on, because both are routinely misstated.

First, it is not a transitional carve-out that has since closed. That 2021 date is the final step of the schedule. The exemption is the standing state of the law.

Second, it is genuinely narrow in what it removes. Pre-recorded captioning under 1.2.2 is not exempt. If you publish a recording of last month's webinar on your website, the live-captioning exemption does nothing for you — that content is pre-recorded now, whatever it was when it happened.

So: an Ontario company with 200 employees, streaming a live town hall, is not required by the IASR to caption it in real time. Publish the recording afterwards and captioning is squarely in scope.

Who does not get the exemption

The Government of Ontario and the Legislative Assembly lost it.

Section 14(3), paragraph 3 required their own internet and intranet sites to meet WCAG 2.0 Level AA in full — including 1.2.4 and 1.2.5 — by 1 January 2020. No exemption, a year earlier than everyone else.

This is the detail that makes blanket statements dangerous in both directions. "The AODA doesn't require live captioning" is wrong if you are a provincial ministry. "The AODA requires live captioning" is wrong if you are a private company with fifty staff. Which answer is right depends entirely on which organisation is asking.

Small organisations are not exempt — they are out of scope

There is a third category that gets lost in the exemption argument entirely.

Section 14 names the Government of Ontario, the Legislative Assembly, designated public sector organisations, and large organisations. Under section 2, a large organisation is one with 50 or more employees in Ontario, and a small organisation has one to 49.

Small organisations are simply not named in section 14. They do not have a reduced obligation or a later deadline — the website conformance requirement never reaches them at all.

That distinction matters practically. An organisation that grows past 49 Ontario employees does not get a grace period to bring its website into conformance; it crosses into a requirement that was already in force. Worth knowing before you hire.

One boundary on all of this: the IASR applies to organisations with at least one employee in Ontario. No Ontario employees, no obligation under this regulation — though other law may still apply.

Reporting and penalties

Accessibility compliance reporting runs on a schedule set by section 86.1. The Government of Ontario reports annually; designated public sector organisations every two years; large organisations every three years. Small organisations with fewer than 20 employees are exempt from reporting altogether, and those with 20 to 49 file on customer service standards only.

The penalty ceilings are real and frequently quoted: up to $100,000 per day for a corporation and $50,000 per day for an individual or unincorporated organisation. Both are maximums, reserved for contraventions assessed as major in impact and history — not a standard rate.

We would rather not repeat the enforcement statistics that circulate in compliance marketing. The figures commonly cited for how many orders have been issued trace back to news reporting and vendor blogs rather than a published ministry compliance report, and we could not verify them against a primary source. Treat any specific enforcement count you read — including ours, if we gave you one — as unconfirmed.

Why the exemption is a poor reason not to caption

Everything above describes a floor. It is worth being clear that the floor is low, and that most organisations captioning live content are not doing it because section 14 told them to.

The exemption reflects what real-time captioning cost and required in 2011, when the schedule was written. It says nothing about whether your audience can follow your webinar.

There are also obligations that sit outside the IASR entirely. The Ontario Human Rights Code imposes a duty to accommodate that operates independently of any accessibility regulation, and it attaches to the individual in front of you rather than to your employee count. An organisation that is comfortably exempt under section 14 can still face an accommodation request it is required to meet.

And the practical case rarely needs the legal one. Captions are used heavily by people who are not deaf or hard of hearing — in open-plan offices, on mute, in a second language, on a poor connection. The exemption is an answer to "must we?", which is a different question from "should we?".

There is also a limit to what captions accomplish. For someone whose first language is ASL or LSQ, captions are text in a second language, and an event can be fully captioned and still not accessible to them. If you are deciding how to caption — and in particular whether you need a human captioner or an automated one — the difference between CART and AI captioning determines both what it costs and what it is suitable for. Broadcasters have a separate set of obligations again, governed by the CEA-608 and CEA-708 standards and the CRTC's accuracy rules.

If you are working out what your own events need, our transcription and captioning service covers live captioning and post-event transcripts, and we are happy to talk through the specifics.