Compliance date: May 11, 2027
Your practice website now has a federal accessibility standard to meet.
The Department of Health and Human Services has adopted WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the technical standard for the websites of every organization that receives federal financial assistance from HHS. Medicare and Medicaid participation is enough to bring a practice within scope. Most practice websites fail it today, and most practices have not been told.
We scan your site the way an assistive technology user would meet it, and give you a plain-language report of exactly what fails, what it means for a patient, and what to fix first. No overlay widget, no retainer, no sales call.
The rule, in plain terms
Does this reach your practice?
The HHS final rule under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act applies to recipients of federal financial assistance from HHS. Practices have generally assumed that means hospitals and health systems. It does not. Medicare Part B reimbursement alone is enough, which places the large majority of clinical practices inside the rule.
Enforcement runs on complaints. One patient who cannot book an appointment online is enough to open one, and OCR looks for evidence of documented, ongoing effort.
Read the full guide to the rule — who is covered, what WCAG 2.1 AA actually asks for, what counts as your website, and what to do in what order.
A real scan
What eight pages of an ordinary dental practice site turned up
This is an unedited result from a small US practice site, run against WCAG 2.1 A and AA. It is a typical profile, not a bad one. The site looks completely fine to a sighted visitor using a mouse.
| Finding | Severity | Instances |
|---|---|---|
| Text does not have enough contrast Unreadable for patients with low vision, cataracts, or diabetic retinopathy |
Serious | 28 |
| Hidden elements can still be focused Keyboard focus vanishes into the closed mobile menu |
Serious | 16 |
| Zooming is disabled on mobile A low-vision patient physically cannot enlarge the text |
Moderate | 8 |
| Embedded frames have no title The map and booking widget announce as "frame" |
Serious | 3 |
The same scan also found two patient forms published as PDFs. Documents are inside the rule, and scanned intake paperwork is usually the single largest gap a practice has.
Honest scope
What an automated audit can and cannot tell you
Any vendor who tells you a scan proves compliance is selling you something that will not hold up. Automated testing reliably catches roughly a third of real WCAG issues. It is the fastest, cheapest way to find them — and it is not the whole job.
Our report covers
- Missing image alternatives
- Unlabelled form fields and buttons
- Colour contrast failures
- Page language and titles
- Heading and landmark structure
- Broken ARIA and duplicate IDs
- Zoom restrictions and frame titles
Needs a human, and we tell you how
- Whether alt text is actually accurate
- Keyboard operability end to end
- Focus visibility and order
- Error recovery in forms
- Video captions and audio description
- PDF and document accessibility
- Screen reader announcement quality
Every report ends with a manual testing checklist written for your staff, covering the second column. Most practices can work through it themselves in an afternoon. That is the part almost everyone skips, and it is where the failures that actually get complained about live.
If someone has sold you an accessibility overlay, read this first
Overlay widgets — the little accessibility icon in the corner — do not bring a site into conformance with WCAG, and they are not a defence in an OCR complaint. In January 2025 the Federal Trade Commission fined a leading overlay vendor $1 million over claims that its product made websites compliant. Our scans routinely find dozens of failures on sites running one. We do not sell overlays and we will tell you plainly if yours is not doing what you were told it does.
Pricing
One report, one price, no retainer
Accessibility consultancies quote $1,500 to $5,000 for a first audit of a small site, and most practices stall there and do nothing for another year. This is priced to be the obvious first step instead.
Baseline audit
- Up to 25 pages tested against WCAG 2.1 A and AA
- Every failure with the page, element, and code shown
- What each one means for a patient, in plain English
- Specific fix instructions your web developer can act on
- A prioritised 90-day remediation sequence
- Manual testing checklist for your staff
- Dated PDF for your compliance file
Not ready? Start with the free scan instead.
Ongoing monitoring
- Automatic re-scan every month
- Alert when a new failure appears
- Updated dated report each month
- Running record of remediation progress
- Cancel any time
Sites regress. New pages, new plugins, and new content undo fixes within months, and a dated record of continuing effort is exactly what OCR asks to see.
Start monitoring — $79/moMost practices start with the audit first.
Multiple locations or a dental service organization? Ask about volume pricing — hello@accessiblepractice.com.
Questions
Before you ask
Is this a legal requirement or a recommendation?
It is a federal rule with a compliance date. HHS adopted WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the technical standard under Section 504. We are not lawyers and this is not legal advice — take the report to your counsel if you want a view on your specific exposure.
Do you fix the problems too?
No. We find and explain them; your existing web developer fixes them. That keeps us honest — we have no reason to inflate what we find, and you are not locked into us. Most reports we produce are handed straight to the agency that already maintains the site.
Will a scan slow down or damage my website?
No. It loads a handful of your public pages in an ordinary browser, exactly as a visitor would, and reads the resulting page. It changes nothing and touches no patient data.
My website is managed by an agency. Should they do this?
Ask them. Many practice web agencies have not yet read the rule, and some will quote you several thousand dollars to find out what a $249 scan will tell you this week. Send them the report either way — it is written to be actionable by a developer.
What if my site is fine?
Then the free scan says so and you have spent nothing. That happens, and it is worth knowing.