Dental and medical practices have two reasons to care about website accessibility. One is the Americans with Disabilities Act, which applies to places of public accommodation, including the websites patients use to find and reach you. The other is Section 504 and Section 1557, which apply to health programs and providers that receive federal financial assistance, including many practices that accept Medicare or Medicaid. Federal rules in recent years have pointed those providers at the WCAG 2.1 Level AA standard specifically. Your attorney or compliance advisor can tell you which rules apply to your practice.
Where practice websites usually fail
- Appointment request forms with unlabeled fields, so a screen reader cannot tell the patient what to enter.
- New patient paperwork published as scanned PDFs that no assistive technology can read.
- Insurance and pricing tables built as images.
- Patient portal links that open in a new window with no warning, or that lead to a portal with its own accessibility problems.
- Before and after galleries with no descriptions.
- Chat widgets and pop-ups that trap keyboard users.
- Low contrast palettes, which are common in spa-style practice designs.
Your patients are the people most affected
This is the part practice owners tend to feel most. Older patients, patients with low vision, patients recovering from surgery and patients with tremor or limited dexterity are a large share of the people trying to book with you. If the booking form only works with a precise mouse click, you are losing appointments from exactly the group that needs care most, and you rarely hear about it.
Accessibility and patient privacy together
Practices also have to be careful about what their website collects. Tracking pixels on pages about conditions and treatments have drawn regulator and plaintiff attention in recent years. We look at both sides: the accessibility of the site and the notices, consent and privacy language behind it. See compliance policies for what we generate and keep current.
How we work with practices
We start with a scan, install and configure accessibility tooling, publish an accessibility statement with a way for patients to report a barrier, prioritize the booking and intake paths because that is where patients actually get stuck, and keep monitoring as your site changes. We will also tell you which items automated tools cannot fix so that your web developer can handle them.
Start with a free scan. Enter your domain on our free website accessibility scan page and see where your practice site stands today. Then call 1-866-677-4443 or send a message and we will go through the results with you. Plans start at $79 per month, most sites are set up within 24 hours, and there is a 7-day free trial.