Does Your Therapy Practice Website Need to Be Accessible?
Web accessibility means that your website can be used by everyone, including people with visual, motor, cognitive, or hearing disabilities. In practice this means things like: can someone who is blind navigate your site using a screen reader? Can someone who cannot use a mouse get to your booking page using only a keyboard? Can someone with low vision read your text because the contrast between the text color and the background is high enough?
The international standard for web accessibility is called WCAG, which stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. The current standard is WCAG 2.1 Level AA, which is the benchmark referenced by the Americans with Disabilities Act and by most legal and compliance conversations in the United States. [1]
Why this matters for therapists
At the heart of the therapy profession is a commitment to helping people with dignity and without discrimination. That is both an ethical standard and a legal obligation. Your website is often the first point of contact between you and a potential client. That same commitment should extend to it, meaning anyone who needs your services should be able to reach you regardless of how they access the web.
We discussed this with a licensed attorney who practices in a number of states on the East Coast including New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. She advised that websites serving the public are subject to ADA obligations, and healthcare providers in particular have a heightened responsibility to ensure their digital presence is accessible. This is not a fringe legal position. Courts across the United States have consistently ruled that ADA Title III applies to websites as places of public accommodation. [2]
The legal landscape around this is real and growing. More than 5,000 federal and state lawsuits over website accessibility were filed in the United States in 2025, a significant increase from the year before. [3] It is worth noting that the majority of these cases targeted e-commerce and online retail businesses, not healthcare providers specifically. That said, the obligation to maintain an accessible website applies to any business that serves the public, regardless of size or industry.
How widespread is the problem?
WebAIM, a nonprofit dedicated to web accessibility, analyzes one million of the most visited websites every year. Their 2026 report found that 95.9% had detectable accessibility failures. [4] The most common issues included low-contrast text which affected 79.1% of home pages, and missing alt text on images which affected 55.5%. Alt text refers to short descriptions embedded in a page's code that tell screen readers what an image contains. Without it, someone who is blind hears nothing when they reach that image. [5]
Building to accessibility standards is a conscious effort. Website building platforms can provide tools and templates that support accessibility, but they do not automatically apply to every build. How accessible a site ends up being depends entirely on the choices made during the build, from the colors and fonts chosen to the way the page is structured and how easy it is to navigate. [6][7]
The same is true when working with a web designer. Accessibility standards are not a universal baseline in web design practice. Many designers produce beautiful, functional websites without accessibility as a specific focus unless explicitly asked to. If you are hiring someone to build your site, asking whether they build to WCAG 2.1 AA standards is an important question.
What about those accessibility widgets?
You may have come across tools that promise to make your website accessible by adding a small piece of code. These are called overlay tools, and they typically add a floating toolbar to your site with options like increased text size, high contrast mode, or a "screen reader mode." They are sometimes recommended as a quick compliance fix, and for some visitors they can genuinely help. Someone with mild low vision who needs larger text or higher contrast may find them useful.
Where they fall short is for people who rely on screen readers, software that reads a page aloud and allows navigation using keyboard commands. Screen reader users are typically blind or have severe visual impairments. They cannot see the floating toolbar that an overlay tool adds to the page. Even if they could find it, the options it offers, larger text, higher contrast, a different font, are visual adjustments that do not help someone who cannot see the page at all. What a screen reader user needs is for the page itself to be built correctly, with proper labels, logical structure, and meaningful descriptions of images. An overlay tool cannot add those things after the fact. If a form field was never labeled in the code, no toolbar button can label it. If an image has no description written into it, no widget can conjure one. This stops any person using the screen reader from meaningfully using your website and overlay tools cannot help in this context.
For example, if a contact form has fields that are not properly labeled in code, a sighted visitor sees the word "Email" above the field and knows what to type; a screen reader user, however, hears nothing meaningful when they reach that field because the connection between the label and the input does not exist. An overlay tool can add a high contrast button or a font size slider, but it cannot create a label that was never there. This means that the person using the screen reader cannot fill out the form and in turn cannot reach the therapist.
The data reflects this limitation. Automated accessibility tools, including the kind overlay products rely on, catch roughly 30 to 40 percent of real accessibility issues. The remaining 60 to 70 percent require human judgment to identify and fix. [8] In 2025, the Federal Trade Commission approved a final order requiring accessiBe, one of the most widely used overlay products, to pay $1 million over misleading claims that it could make websites fully compliant with accessibility standards. [9] Courts have also found overlay tools insufficient protection in multiple ADA cases. [10]
These tools are not without value, but they are not a substitute for accessibility built into the site from the start.
Where to start
If you want a quick sense of where your current site stands, you can use a free tool called WAVE, built by WebAIM, one of the leading organizations in web accessibility research. You paste your URL and it gives you a visual overview of potential issues on your page. It will not catch everything, but it will surface the most obvious gaps and give you a starting point. You can try it at wave.webaim.org.
Beyond that, a properly accessible website requires manual testing that goes deeper than automated tools can go. It means navigating the site using only a keyboard, without a mouse, to make sure every link, button, and form field can be reached. It means testing with a screen reader to hear how the page is actually experienced by someone who cannot see it. It means checking that every image has a meaningful description, that every form field is properly labeled, and that the visual design meets contrast standards for people with low vision. Automated tools catch roughly 30 to 40 percent of real accessibility issues. The rest requires human attention and judgment. [8]
Whether you are building your site yourself, using a website platform, or working with a designer, accessibility is worth making an explicit part of the conversation from the start. Having an accessible website will ensure that people who could need your help will be able to read and interact with your website regardless of how they browse the web.
Sources
[1] ADA.gov — Web Accessibility Guidance: https://www.ada.gov/resources/web-guidance/
[2] ADA Title III and websites — DOJ and federal court rulings: https://www.digitala11y.com/compliance/ada/
[3] ADA website lawsuit statistics 2025-2026:
https://wcagsafe.com/blog/ada-lawsuit-statistics
[4] WebAIM Million 2026 Report: https://webaim.org/projects/million/
[5] Web Accessibility Statistics 2026: https://beaccessible.com/post/web-accessibility-statistics/
[6] Wix ADA Compliance Guide 2026: https://wcagsafe.com/blog/wix-ada-compliance
[7] Squarespace Accessibility Guide 2026: https://avp.io/guides/squarespace-accessibility
[8] Automated accessibility tools catch 30 to 40 percent of issues: https://exceedability.com/manual-vs-automated-testing.html
[9] FTC final order against accessiBe, April 2025:
[10] ADA Title III website accessibility lawsuit data: https://accessibility.build/research/accessibility-lawsuits