Ontario's Digital Service Standard — Mandatory Inclusive-Design Cards and Disabled-User Testing

Since January 2021, the Government of Ontario's Digital Service Standard has made accessibility a mandatory, not optional, requirement for every digital product and service the government builds. Standard #7, 'Make it accessible and inclusive', requires teams to meet WCAG 2.1 level AA, and explicitly to test with people with disabilities — manually, with an automated checker, with a screen reader, and by zooming to 400% — as well as with users who have lower digital skills or limited connectivity.
To help teams act on that requirement early, Ontario Digital Service publishes a set of Inclusive Design Cards, first released in December 2017 and still updated as of August 2025, organised around five themes: empathy-centred design, physical accessibility, audio experiences, visual experiences and cognitive accessibility. The cards and the wider toolkit are freely downloadable in PDF and Word format from GitHub, aimed at helping practitioners sketch, plan, prototype and design content and interactions before a product is built, not just audit it afterwards.
Ontario says the standard was developed by drawing on equivalent digital service standards from the Canadian Digital Service, the UK's Government Digital Service and Australia's Digital Transformation Agency — situating it within an internationally recognised family of practice, corroborated independently by eCampusOntario's own digital accessibility documentation, which confirms the WCAG 2.1 AA testing requirement and the use of accessibility advisory panels including people with differing abilities.
What is missing from the public record is any measure of compliance or impact: neither Ontario's own site nor independent sources report how many services have actually been tested with disabled users, or what issues that testing has found and fixed. The practice is a well-documented, mandatory policy framework, but its real-world enforcement and outcomes are not independently evidenced.

Read the full analysis: https://www.ontario.ca/page/digital-service-standard