Website accessibility for dental and doctor's offices

Dental offices, doctor's offices and small practices run on the same website tools as everyone else: online booking, new-patient forms as PDFs, photos of the office and the team. A Department of Health and Human Services rule now sets a date for when a covered practice's website and patient documents have to work for blind, low-vision and disabled patients too.

Does this apply to you?

HHS's Section 504 rule (45 CFR part 84, subpart I) covers any practice that receives federal financial assistance from HHS. Medicare Part B payments count on their own, even with no other federal money (HHS rule, Federal Register, May 6, 2024).

  • Doctor's offices: most take Medicare Part B, so most are covered.
  • Dental offices: Medicare Part B pays for almost no dental care. A dental office is covered only if it takes Medicaid, CHIP, or other HHS funding. A dentist who takes none of those is not covered by this rule.

Not covered? WCAG 2.1 AA is still the standard EveryRamp tests against — the same standard the federal rule uses for the practices it does cover. Website-accessibility lawsuits are also rising nationally, regardless of a practice's federal-payer status: federal filings rose 27% in 2025 to 3,117 (Seyfarth Shaw, ADA Title III blog, March 25, 2026). A free scan is a reasonable first step either way.

Your deadline

If Section 504 covers your practice, the date depends on your headcount, not which services you offer:

  • 15 or more employees: May 11, 2027.
  • Fewer than 15 employees: May 10, 2028.

HHS moved both dates back a year in an interim final rule published May 11, 2026 (HHS interim final rule, Federal Register, May 11, 2026). The standard is WCAG 2.1 Level A and AA for your website, patient-facing apps and posted documents. A lawsuit filed in May 2026 asks a federal court to undo that extension; there has been no ruling, and we will update this page if the dates change. More about the deadline.

Documents posted before your deadline are exempt only if no one uses them any more: a new-patient form or consent form you still use today to apply for, gain access to, or participate in care has to meet the standard too, even if you posted it years ago (45 CFR 84.85(b)).

What usually fails on a practice website

  • Online booking. A booking widget that only works with a mouse locks out anyone who navigates by keyboard alone.
  • New-patient PDFs. Intake forms, consent forms and price sheets posted as PDFs often have no tags, so a screen reader cannot read them at all.
  • Photos with no description. Pictures of the office and the team need a text description, or a screen reader skips them or reads a meaningless file name.
  • Low contrast. Light gray text on white, or text over a photo, can be too faint for many patients to read.

These are examples, not a full list. Our free scan checks your actual website and tells you what it found.

What EveryRamp does

We test your website's pages and the PDFs linked from them against WCAG 2.1 AA automatically. When a PDF — a new-patient form, a price sheet, a consent form — fails, we rebuild it as a tagged PDF with headings, lists, tables and a reading order a screen reader can follow, and check that the rebuilt text still says exactly what the original said. Your web team gets a fix pack: corrected code where HTML and CSS can fix a problem, and specific instructions where it can't. Every package includes 12 months of monthly re-testing, so new pages and forms are checked each month.

It's fully automated: nobody reviews your site page by page by hand, and your test report says plainly which checks a machine can find reliably. We work by email; there is nothing to install, and it doesn't matter which platform your website runs on.

The Practice package

  • Practice, $990: one website. Fixes written for up to 15 pages, up to 25 PDF pages rebuilt where screen readers cannot read them, a written test report, and 12 months of monitoring.

After the first year, monitoring is $79 a month. Extra PDF pages are $4 a page ($3 a page over 1,000), the same as our other packages. Founding customers — the first ten organizations — get 30% off in exchange for a short testimonial, same as our other packages.

More than 15 pages, or more than one office? The next size up, Clinic, $2,900, covers up to 30 pages and 100 PDF pages. Each package covers one website. Order the Practice package, or ask for a written quote for your records. All packages.

What automated testing cannot do

Our tests find the problems a machine can find reliably, and our report says plainly which things need a person to judge. A document that passes our automated tests has had those problems found and fixed; it has not been reviewed by a person reading it with a screen reader. What automated testing checks, and what it cannot.

Start here

  1. Run a free scan of your website: a plain-English report at a private link, usually within a few minutes.
  2. Order a package, or request a formal quote for your records.

This page is general information, not legal advice.