Which governments are included

The governments league covers the primary public Web portal of each of Canada's ten provincial and three territorial governments — for example alberta.ca, quebec.ca and gov.nu.ca — 13 portals in all, ranked separately from the municipal leagues. Inclusion is rule-based: every government is listed through its main public portal, and no government is added or omitted by choice. Separate ministry, agency and Crown-corporation websites are outside the league's scope. The population shown for each government is the 2021 Census count for its province or territory.

What we test

Each government's primary public portal is crawled and tested with axe-core, the industry-standard open-source accessibility engine, against WCAG 2.2 Level A and AA rules (including W3C ACT rules). We aim for full-site coverage: every page discovered by following the portal's own internal links, the same way a resident browses. The number of pages tested is shown for every government; calendar and other machine-generated date-pagination pages are excluded so page counts reflect real content.

Every site is tested with identical tools, identical rules, and a deliberately gentle crawl rate designed to be indistinguishable from light human browsing. We respect technical barriers: if a site's security system blocks our testing, we stop and list the site as insufficient data — we never publish a score from an incomplete or unreliable sample, and we never attempt to work around a block.

How the score works

The health score (0–100) reflects the number and severity of WCAG 2.2 A/AA issues detected per page, averaged across all pages tested. Because it is a per-page average, scores are comparable between portals tested with different sample sizes. Issues inside embedded third-party content (for example a video player) are reported but excluded from the score, since they are typically outside the government's direct control. AAA and best-practice observations are reported for information only and never affect the score.

In detail: every page starts at 100 points, and each confirmed WCAG 2.2 A/AA violation subtracts points weighted by severity:

• critical — 8 points
• serious — 5 points
• moderate — 2 points
• minor — 1 point

Repeated instances of the same issue on a page count with diminishing weight (the first instance counts fully; each additional instance adds a square-root-scaled fraction), so one template error repeated a hundred times lowers the score meaningfully but does not zero it. A page never goes below 0.

The site score is the plain average of all page scores, rounded to one decimal. Findings beyond WCAG 2.2 AA (AAA and best-practice checks) are reported as enhanced accessibility and never reduce the score. Every portal in the league is scored with identical parameters — same engine, same rules, same weights — which is what makes scores comparable between governments.

What the score is not

Automated tools can verify roughly a third of WCAG 2.2 success criteria — the machine-checkable subset. Because that subset accounts for most real-world defects, automated scans typically surface the majority of issues by volume (Deque, the maker of axe-core, reports about 57%) — but coverage of criteria and coverage of issues are different measures. A score of 100 therefore does not mean a site conforms to WCAG, and a lower score is not a determination that a government fails any legal obligation. Full conformance evaluation requires manual expert testing. The scores published here are the opinion of Bayhan Technologies Inc., produced by our software using the methodology on this page.

Corrections, retests and opt-out

We believe a public index carries public obligations. Any listed government may, at no cost:

• Request the complete automated findings behind its result — page-by-page, issue-by-issue;
• Dispute a result — we will verify, and correct promptly and visibly if we got it wrong;
• Request a retest after making fixes — rankings are refreshed monthly, and we will retest sooner on request;
• Opt out — we will remove the listing.

Contact: info@civicpermit.solutions.

Why we publish this

Government Web portals are essential infrastructure: taxes, permits, health services, emergency information. Roughly one in five Canadians lives with a disability, and machine-detectable barriers are the easiest ones to find and fix. This index exists to celebrate the governments doing well and to give every government a free, concrete starting point. Bayhan Technologies sells accessibility assessment services; this index is free, and no government is ever required to engage us to be listed, corrected, retested or removed.