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 mandatory, not optional, 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 to test directly with people with disabilities.

The standard aims to ensure government digital services are genuinely usable by people with disabilities, not just technically compliant, by requiring hands-on testing rather than relying on automated checks alone.

Standard #7 requires teams to test 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 support this, Ontario Digital Service publishes free Inclusive Design Cards (first released December 2017, still updated as of August 2025), organised around five themes — empathy-centred design, physical accessibility, audio experiences, visual experiences and cognitive accessibility — downloadable as PDF and Word files from GitHub to help teams design inclusively before a product is built, not just audit it afterwards. The standard was developed by drawing on comparable digital service standards from Canada's Canadian Digital Service, the UK's Government Digital Service and Australia's Digital Transformation Agency, and is corroborated independently by eCampusOntario's own accessibility documentation, which confirms the WCAG 2.1 AA testing requirement and the use of accessibility advisory panels that include people with differing abilities.

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.