VP of Marketing, Ontario B2B services firm (~150 employees, regulated industry)

An Ontario B2B firm received a Section 14 AODA accessibility complaint and engaged us to remediate the website to WCAG 2.0 Level AA. We ran the program as a joint accessibility + technical SEO sprint and delivered both compliance and a measurable organic lift.

Service & engagement

The challenge

The firm was facing a compliance complaint with potential regulatory exposure under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act. The site failed an automated accessibility scan on roughly 240 individual issues across 80 templates: missing alt text, weak colour contrast, heading-hierarchy violations, missing form labels, and non-keyboard-navigable components. Many of these issues were also active technical SEO problems — heading hierarchy errors hurt extraction, missing alt text hurts image search, and weak focus indicators correlate with engagement signals.

Approach

1. 1
   Audited the site against WCAG 2.0 Level AA in weeks 1–2 using axe-core + manual keyboard + screen-reader testing on the top 20 templates. Documented every failure with severity (blocker, major, minor) and remediation effort.
2. 2
   Sequenced the remediation work into three sprints: heading hierarchy + alt text + form labels first (weeks 3–6), colour contrast + focus indicators (weeks 7–9), JavaScript-heavy components (weeks 10–14).
3. 3
   Ran the program with explicit dual deliverables on every sprint: an accessibility deliverable (passes axe scan, manual screen-reader test) AND an SEO deliverable (heading hierarchy audit, alt-text completeness, internal-link anchor quality).
4. 4
   Re-validated the site at end of month 4 with both an automated scan and a manual audit by an external accessibility consultant. Issued an updated accessibility statement on the site.
5. 5
   Measured organic search performance pre/post on a 50-query basket; tracked GSC impressions, CTR, and average position for 90 days post-remediation.

Outcomes

Reflection

AODA remediation and technical SEO are deeply overlapping disciplines. A heading hierarchy fix is both an accessibility deliverable AND a structured-data extraction improvement. Alt-text completion is both a screen-reader fix AND an image-search optimization. Most agencies treat them as separate workstreams; running them as a single sprint with dual deliverables produces both compliance and ranking lift on the same budget. We now bundle these whenever a client engages on either side of the work.