The Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, 2005 (AODA) is a statute enacted in 2005 by the Legislative Assembly of Ontario in Canada.
Its purpose is to improve accessibility standards for Ontarians with physical and mental disabilities to all public establishments by 2025.
[7] Other institutions required to provide annual plans addressing accessibility issues included public transportation systems, hospitals, district school boards, universities, colleges of applied arts and technology, and other government agencies.
[6] Those who supported the idea of an ODA hoped that it would require government bodies, and others bound by law to identify the barriers that they now have which impede persons with disabilities from full participation, and to design reasonable plans consistent with their resources to remove these barriers and to prevent new ones from being created, all within reasonable timelines.
[12] David Onley, who served as lieutenant governor of Ontario from 2007 until 2014, and who had partial paralysis as a result of childhood polio, was a special advisor on accessibility.
[13] In 2019, Onley submitted a third review of AODA to the provincial legislature, which found that the province was very far from meeting the legislation's planned 2025 date for full accessibility.
[15] Barbara Turnbull, a quadriplegic Toronto Star reporter, wrote in a memoir ebook that the government of Ontario has not enacted sufficient standards regulations to "ensure full accessibility by 2025".