Accessibility and AI: Beyond Checkbox Compliance
Accessibility obligations for Canadian organisations have expanded significantly over the past decade. Ontario's AODA established compliance requirements for provincial organisations; the Accessible Canada Act created obligations for the federal public sector and federally regulated industries; and provincial accessibility frameworks in British Columbia and Manitoba extend the coverage further. At the same time, WCAG 2.2 AA has become the functional standard for digital accessibility.
AI-powered accessibility tools sit at an important intersection: they can accelerate compliance with legal obligations, and they can also create genuinely more inclusive services and workplaces for the Canadians who need them. These goals often align — but the distinction matters, because compliance-focused implementation tends to underinvest in the actual user experience of people with disabilities.
Speech-to-Text and Live Captioning
Speech-to-text AI converts spoken content to written text in real time — enabling Deaf and hard-of-hearing users to follow conversations, meetings, lectures, and media without requiring human interpreters or pre-produced captions. Major platforms (Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google Meet) now include AI captioning as a built-in feature; dedicated CART and captioning services use AI as their underlying engine.
For Canadian organisations, the relevant language considerations extend beyond English and French. Indigenous languages are not currently supported by mainstream AI captioning at adequate accuracy levels — a significant gap for organisations serving First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities. Organisations with Indigenous community relationships should not assume AI captioning will work and should maintain human interpretation capacity.
The practical deployment question for most organisations is not whether to use AI captioning — most already do through their meeting platforms — but whether the implementation meets the quality standard required for the context. A casual team meeting has different accuracy requirements than a medical consultation or a legal proceeding.
Remolda's multilingual chatbot services address language-specific accessibility considerations for Canadian service delivery contexts.
AI Screen Readers and Visual Accessibility
Screen reader technology — software that converts on-screen text and interface elements to audio output — is the primary accessibility tool for blind and low-vision users. AI enhances screen reader capability in two significant ways: image description (generating alt text for images that have none) and interface understanding (using computer vision to describe screen content that is not structured with accessibility markup).
Microsoft's Seeing AI, Google's Lookout, and similar tools use AI to describe images, read handwritten text, and identify people and objects in a user's visual environment. For organisations producing documents and web content, AI tools can audit existing content for missing alt text and suggest generated descriptions — though generated alt text should be reviewed by a sighted person for accuracy and appropriateness.
WCAG 2.2 AA requirements for images (Success Criterion 1.1.1) require meaningful alt text for all informational images — a requirement that many large Canadian organisations are not fully meeting. AI-powered accessibility auditing tools can identify the gap at scale; AI-generated alt text can fill it for image libraries, with human review for critical content.
WCAG 2.2 Compliance Support Through AI
AI-powered accessibility testing tools (axe, WAVE, Deque systems) automate detection of WCAG failures across websites and applications. They identify missing form labels, insufficient colour contrast, keyboard navigation failures, and structural markup problems — issues that manual testing would require significant time to find at scale.
The limitation of automated accessibility testing is consistent across all tools: automated checkers detect approximately 30–40% of WCAG failures. The remainder require human judgment — evaluating whether an interaction makes sense to a screen reader user, whether a form is actually usable by keyboard alone, whether content reads coherently when encountered non-visually.
For Canadian organisations under AODA or federal accessibility obligations, a defensible compliance program requires both AI-assisted automated testing and human accessibility testing with users who have disabilities. AI accelerates the former; it does not replace the latter.
See Remolda's government digital services for accessibility-focused implementation experience in the Canadian public sector.
ASL/LSQ Interpretation: Current State and Realistic Expectations
The Canadian Deaf community uses two distinct sign languages: ASL in English-speaking Canada and LSQ in Quebec. Both are fully expressive natural languages, unrelated to spoken English and French. Providing interpretation access for Deaf Canadians in healthcare, legal, educational, and government services is an AODA obligation in Ontario and a human rights obligation more broadly.
AI ASL/LSQ interpretation tools exist but are significantly limited compared to human interpreters. Current AI tools can recognise a defined vocabulary of signs with reasonable accuracy in controlled conditions; they cannot handle the grammatical complexity, regional variation, and contextual nuance of real ASL/LSQ in consequential settings.
The practical implication for Canadian organisations is: AI interpretation tools are not adequate replacements for human ASL/LSQ interpreters in healthcare, legal proceedings, or educational delivery. They may have utility in self-service or low-stakes contexts with limited vocabulary. Investment in human interpreter access, including remote video interpreting services, remains the appropriate primary accommodation strategy.
Federal AAACT Obligations and AI Strategy
Federal public sector organisations are increasingly incorporating AI tools into their accessibility plans under the Accessible Canada Act framework. The AAACT program at Shared Services Canada provides adaptive technology tools (screen readers, voice input systems, ergonomic peripherals) to federal public servants, and AI-enhanced versions of these tools are part of current procurement.
Federal departments with service delivery mandates are using AI captioning in public consultations, AI-powered plain language tools to make communications more accessible to people with cognitive and learning disabilities, and AI document conversion tools to produce accessible PDF and HTML versions of government publications.
The requirement under the ACA is proactive barrier identification and removal — not reactive accommodation. AI tools that continuously audit digital services for accessibility failures, flag new barriers as they are introduced, and suggest remediation are aligned with the spirit of proactive accessibility obligations.
Remolda designs AI accessibility implementations for Canadian government and healthcare organisations that meet legal obligations while creating genuinely better experiences. Contact us to discuss your accessibility AI requirements.