Field Notes · 03

10 tell-tale signs your medical website is not accessible

You do not need an audit tool to spot most accessibility failures on a clinic website. Here are the ten I find on nearly every first visit, and what each one costs you.

Patrick Jean-Baptiste · August 22, 2026

Most clinic owners assume their website is accessible because nobody has complained. That is the wrong signal to watch. A patient who cannot read your hours or book an appointment does not file a complaint. They call a different practice, or they do nothing at all, and you never hear about it.

I review a lot of medical websites, most of them built by well-meaning people on templates that were never tested with a keyboard or a screen reader. The same problems show up again and again. You can find every one of them yourself in under thirty minutes, without a scanner, without a plugin, and without paying anyone.

Here are the ten I check first.

1. You cannot get through the site with the Tab key

Put your mouse away. Load your home page and press Tab, then keep pressing it. Every link, button, menu item and form field should light up in order, and you should always be able to see which element is selected.

If the focus outline vanishes, if you get stuck inside the navigation menu, or if the "Book Now" button never receives focus because it is really a styled div, your site fails the most basic test there is. Keyboard navigation is how screen reader users move through a page, and it is also how people with tremors, repetitive strain injuries and many motor disabilities browse the web. It is the first thing a plaintiff's firm checks, too.

2. Images have no alt text, or the alt text is the file name

Right-click any image on your site and inspect it. If the alt attribute is missing, empty on an image that carries meaning, or reads something like IMG_4471.jpg or doctor-smiling-stock-photo, a blind patient hears nothing useful and a search engine indexes nothing useful.

This one matters twice. Alt text is an accessibility requirement and it is also one of the few on-page SEO levers that still works. A photo of your front entrance with alt text describing the entrance, the ramp and the parking helps a wheelchair user decide whether to visit and helps Google understand the page. A photo with alt text stuffed with "best pediatrician West Palm Beach" helps nobody and can hurt you.

3. Light gray text on white

Designers love it. Nobody over fifty can read it. WCAG 2.1 requires a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 for body text and 3 to 1 for large text. The soft gray that ships in most themes lands somewhere around 2.5 to 1.

Medical practices are especially exposed here because a large share of your patients, or the parents and caregivers of your patients, have reduced vision, are reading on a phone in a parking lot, or are exhausted at two in the morning trying to find your after-hours number. Contrast is the cheapest accessibility fix on this list and the one with the widest payoff.

4. Your forms do not have real labels

Placeholder text inside the field is not a label. The moment someone starts typing, the placeholder disappears, and for a screen reader it may never have been announced at all. Look at your appointment request form, your new patient intake form and your contact form. Each field needs a visible <label> element attached to it with a for attribute, and required fields need to say so in text rather than with a lone red asterisk.

Forms are where accessibility failures turn directly into lost revenue. A form a patient cannot complete is an appointment you never got.

5. Error messages that only change color

Submit one of your forms with a field left blank. If the only thing that happens is the field border turns red, a colorblind user sees nothing, a screen reader user hears nothing, and both of them are stuck. Errors need to be written out in text, placed next to the field, and announced to assistive technology.

6. The site depends on hover

Menus that only open on mouse hover, tooltips that explain a service only when the cursor rests on an icon, image captions that appear on rollover. None of that exists for someone on a touch screen or a keyboard. If important information appears on hover and nowhere else, it effectively does not exist for a large portion of your patients.

7. Videos with no captions and PDFs that are scanned images

Your welcome video from the physician, your "what to expect at your first visit" walkthrough, the vaccine schedule you uploaded as a PDF. If the video has no captions and no transcript, deaf and hard of hearing patients get nothing from it. If the PDF is a scan, a screen reader sees a picture and reads nothing.

Patient forms are the worst offender. A scanned intake packet that patients are supposed to download, print, fill out and bring in is inaccessible to blind patients, to patients without a printer, and to anyone on a phone. Rebuild them as real HTML forms or, at minimum, as tagged, text-based PDFs.

8. Heading structure that is really just big text

Open the page and look for the outline. Is there exactly one <h1>? Do the sections use <h2>, and the subsections under them use <h3>? Or did the page builder let someone pick "Heading 4" because it looked the right size?

Screen reader users navigate by jumping from heading to heading. If your headings are out of order, or your "headings" are paragraphs with a large font, that shortcut is gone and the whole page becomes a wall of audio. Search engines read the same outline you do, so a broken heading structure costs you rankings as well.

9. Links that say "click here" and "learn more"

Screen readers can pull up a list of every link on a page, out of context. A list that reads "click here, click here, learn more, read more, here" tells the user nothing. Every link should make sense on its own: "Request a newborn visit," "Download the sports physical form," "See our after-hours policy." That is also what Google wants your anchor text to look like.

10. An accessibility overlay widget in the corner

This is the one that surprises people. That little wheelchair icon that pops open a panel of font sizes and color toggles fixes nothing underneath. In practice it usually breaks the assistive technology the user already runs, it does nothing about missing labels or broken keyboard navigation, and plaintiffs' attorneys have learned to treat it as a sign that the site owner knows there is a problem and bought a sticker instead of fixing it. Hundreds of the lawsuits filed in recent years were against sites that had one of these widgets installed. In 2025 the Federal Trade Commission went after one of the largest overlay vendors for claiming its product made sites compliant.

If you have one, the money is better spent on the nine items above.

What to do with this list

Go through your own site with this checklist before anyone else does. Most clinic websites fail at least six of the ten, and most of those six can be fixed in an afternoon by someone who knows what they are doing. Contrast, labels, alt text, headings and link text are all content and template changes; none of them requires a rebuild.

Two of these, keyboard navigation and form errors, can require real work depending on how the site was built. Those are the ones to ask your developer about first, because they are also the ones that generate demand letters.

The federal rules behind all this are covered in a separate note on website accessibility law for medical practices, and there is a companion guide on how to fix an inaccessible medical website that walks through each of these ten in the order I would tackle them.