On this page

• Overview
• Accessibility plans
• Progress reports
• Amending your feedback process and publishing a new description

Overview

The Accessible Canada Act (ACA) and the Accessible Canada Regulations (regulations) require that federally regulated entities participate in an accessibility planning and reporting cycle. This cycle includes the publication of accessibility plans and progress reports.

Accessibility plans

Under the Accessible Canada Regulations, you must publish a description of your feedback process at the same time that you publish your first accessibility plan. Read the guidance section on different entities’ deadlines for publishing their first plans.

Read the guidance on preparing and publishing accessibility plans for additional details.

Progress reports

Each of your progress reports on the implementation of your accessibility plans must include a “General” heading. Under this heading, you must provide the same information as you provide under the “General” heading in your accessibility plan.

Additional guidance on progress reports will be available in 2022.

Amending your feedback process and publishing a new description

The ACA and its regulations establish a regular cycle for regulated entities to publish their initial accessibility plan, progress reports and updated accessibility plans. They do not establish such a cycle for amending feedback processes or publishing new descriptions of those processes.

Nevertheless, whenever an entity amends its feedback process, it must publish a description of the new version of that process. It must fulfill the same requirements when publishing a new description as it did when publishing the original one. Read the guidance on publication requirements for feedback process descriptions.

Organizations have different resources, needs, and capabilities. They serve different clients and provide different services. How and when they update their feedback processes may depend on:

• what feedback they receive about the implementation of their accessibility plans, and what progress they are making in that implementation
• what feedback process best helps them identify, remove, and prevent barriers in their policies, programs, practices, services, and spaces

An organization may also be required to amend their feedback process and publish a new description if:

• the latest version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) available in French and English changes, and the description no longer meets Level AA requirements
• there is a change to any elements of the feedback process that the description describes, and the description is no longer accurate
• something should arise from an interaction with the Accessibility Commissioner’s inspector

As you plan whether or not to amend your organization’s feedback process, you may wish to consider some or all of the following:

• whether something has changed in how you intend to receive or deal with feedback
• whether the existing feedback process is generating the amount and type of feedback you require
• whether you are receiving feedback more frequently through some means of communication than others, and why this might be so
• whether changes that may have taken place in your organization’s operations, structure or resources would make a new feedback process desirable
• whether your organization has begun to communicate with the public through a means for which the current feedback process does not yet account