ACA on Contentful: complete compliance checklist

ACA in 60 seconds

The Accessible Canada Act (ACA, 2019) requires federally regulated entities — federal government, banks, telecom, broadcasting, transportation — to identify, remove and prevent accessibility barriers, with the explicit goal of "a Canada without barriers by 2040" and detailed regulations layered on top including the ICT regulations referencing EN 301 549.

Contentful accessibility — what you are starting with

Headless CMS pushes accessibility responsibility onto the front-end. Contentful's editorial tooling supports alt text and semantic structure but does not enforce it.

ACA setup checklist for Contentful

1. Configure required alt text in Asset model: Make alt text required at content model level.

2. Audit Rich Text renderer: Map document nodes to semantic HTML in your consuming app.

Common ACA failures on Contentful

• Front-end framework variance

• Alt text discipline in Asset library

• Rich Text rendering without semantic mapping

Putting it together

Combine ACA's Level AA requirements with Contentful's native tooling. Bake accessibility into your component library and editorial workflow; instrument axe-core in CI for regression.