Healthcare websites serve a critical function: connecting patients with the medical services they need. But if your healthcare website isn’t accessible, you’re excluding the very people who may need your services most.
One in four Americans have some type of disability. When your website creates barriers for those patients, you’re not just risking legal trouble – you’re failing your fundamental mission as a healthcare provider.
Web accessibility in healthcare isn’t a nice-to-have feature. It’s a legal requirement, an ethical obligation and a business imperative.
Why Healthcare Web Accessibility Matters More Than Ever
The stakes are higher in healthcare than in almost any other industry. When someone can’t access your appointment scheduling system or read your patient portal because of accessibility barriers, they might delay or skip necessary medical care.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) applies to healthcare websites, and enforcement has ramped up significantly. In 2025 alone, over 5,000 federal lawsuits were filed against businesses for website accessibility violations. Healthcare organizations are prime targets because the harm caused by inaccessible medical websites is clear and documented.
Beyond legal compliance, accessible healthcare websites directly impact patient outcomes. Patients with disabilities need to:
- Schedule appointments independently
- Access their medical records through patient portals
- Read test results and treatment instructions
- Communicate with their healthcare providers
- Understand their insurance coverage and billing
An inaccessible website blocks all of this.
WCAG Standards: Your Healthcare Web Accessibility Guide
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 Level AA is the recognized standard for web accessibility in healthcare. This framework covers four key principles:
Perceivable: Information must be presentable to users in ways they can perceive. This means providing text alternatives for images, captions for videos and ensuring sufficient color contrast.
Operable: Users must be able to navigate your website using various input methods, including keyboard-only navigation. This is crucial for patients who cannot use a mouse due to motor disabilities.
Understandable: Content and navigation must be clear and predictable. Medical information is already complex – your website structure shouldn’t add to the confusion.
Robust: Your website must work reliably across different browsers and assistive technologies like screen readers.
Common Accessibility Failures in Healthcare Websites
If you’ve hired a web design agency that specializes in healthcare, they should know exactly what to do. But make sure you properly vet your agency to confirm that the websites in their portfolio are actually accessible, and ideally they should have a web accessibility certification (from a platform like AccessibilityChecker.org).
Many healthcare websites make the same critical mistakes:
Poor form accessibility: Appointment scheduling forms without proper labels, error messages that screen readers can’t identify, and required fields that aren’t marked clearly. These issues prevent patients from booking appointments independently.
Inaccessible patient portals: Many patient portals fail basic accessibility tests. Patients can’t access their own medical records, lab results or prescription information because the interface doesn’t work with assistive technology.
PDF accessibility problems: Healthcare organizations frequently share important documents – consent forms, patient education materials, insurance information – as inaccessible PDFs. Screen readers can’t parse these documents, making them useless to blind patients.
Insufficient color contrast: White text on a colored background might look nice, but it’s not always readable for patients with low vision or color blindness. WCAG 2.2 AA requires a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for larger text.
Missing alternative text: Images convey important medical information, from diagrams explaining procedures to photos of your facility. Without descriptive alt text, blind patients miss this content entirely.
What You Need to Do for Web Accessibility in Healthcare
Achieving healthcare web accessibility requires a systematic approach. Here’s what you need to implement:
Conduct an accessibility audit: Start with automated testing tools to identify obvious violations, then follow up with manual testing using screen readers and keyboard-only navigation. Automated tools don’t catch all issues.
Fix critical barriers first: Prioritize your patient portal, appointment scheduling system and forms. These are the functions patients use most frequently and where accessibility failures cause the most harm.
Create accessible content from the start: Train your content creators on accessibility basics. Every blog post, every patient education resource and every new page should be built accessibly from day one.
Make your PDFs accessible: Use proper heading structure, add alternative text to images within PDFs, ensure reading order is logical and tag all content appropriately. Better yet, provide information in accessible HTML format whenever possible.
Test with real users: Automated tools and expert reviews are essential, but nothing replaces testing with people who actually use assistive technology. Partner with patients who have disabilities to review your website regularly.
Establish accessibility governance: Designate someone responsible for web accessibility in healthcare compliance. This person should review new features before launch, maintain accessibility documentation and stay current on legal requirements.
The Business Case for Healthcare Web Accessibility
Accessible websites aren’t just about compliance – they deliver measurable business benefits:
Extended market reach: You’re opening your services to millions of Americans with disabilities who are currently excluded from many digital experiences.
Improved SEO: Many accessibility practices – clear heading structure, descriptive link text, fast page load times – align directly with search engine optimization best practices.
Better user experience for everyone: Captions help people watching videos in quiet (or loud) offices. Clear navigation helps elderly patients who aren’t tech-savvy. Keyboard navigation helps anyone with a temporary injury.
Reduced legal risk: Proactive accessibility work costs far less than defending accessibility lawsuits, which can result in settlements ranging from $10,000 to over $100,000.
Our Conclusion on Healthcare Web Accessibility
Web accessibility in healthcare is absolutely critical. Your patients deserve equal access to the medical services and information your website provides.
Start by auditing your current website against WCAG 2.2 Level AA standards. Identify your most critical accessibility barriers and create a remediation plan with clear timelines. Partner with accessibility specialists who understand both healthcare compliance requirements and patient needs.
The goal isn’t perfection overnight – it’s continuous improvement toward genuinely inclusive digital healthcare experiences. Every barrier you remove makes medical care more accessible to someone who needs it.
Your website should open doors to healthcare, not close them.
