Does My Dental Website Need to Be ADA Compliant?

Margaret is a composite — her situation is drawn from real accessibility barriers that millions of patients with macular degeneration face when navigating healthcare websites every day. She is 71 years old. She has macular degeneration — a condition that blurs the centre of her vision — and she uses her laptop with the text size set to maximum and a screen magnification tool her son installed for her.

She's been a patient at the same dental practice for eleven years. Last spring, the practice moved to a new patient portal for appointment booking, insurance forms, and pre-visit paperwork. She got the email with a link, clicked through, and spent twenty minutes trying to fill out an updated medical history form.

The form fields had no labels her magnification tool could read. The submit button disappeared when she zoomed in. She couldn't complete the form. She called the front desk instead, was put on hold twice, and eventually gave up and rescheduled her cleaning for a later date.

She didn't complain. She never does. She just quietly had a worse experience than every other patient — not because the practice didn't care, but because nobody had checked whether the portal worked for her.

I'm Laura, co-founder of AccessBridge. We build tools that help small businesses find and document accessibility issues on their websites. I have a commercial interest in this topic, and I'll be upfront about that. But the reason I keep writing about it is Margaret — and the millions of patients like her who silently navigate around broken digital experiences every day. This post is for dental practice owners who want to understand where their real exposure lives and what to do about it.

Does the ADA Apply to Dental Websites?

Yes. The Americans with Disabilities Act applies to the websites of businesses that serve the public — and dental practices qualify. Federal courts have consistently ruled that a practice's website is an extension of its physical premises. If a patient with a disability cannot access information, book an appointment, or use your patient portal online, that is a form of discrimination under the law.

Healthcare providers face an additional layer of obligation. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act prohibits disability discrimination by any organisation that receives federal funding. In May 2024, HHS published a sweeping final rule — the first comprehensive update to its Section 504 regulations in nearly 50 years — that for the first time explicitly defines what "accessible" means for websites, patient portals, and mobile apps. The rule took effect July 8, 2024, and applies to any entity that receives federal financial assistance from HHS, including practices that accept a single Medicare or Medicaid payment. The required standard is WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Phased compliance deadlines run through 2027, but the rule is already in effect and the HHS Office for Civil Rights can investigate proactively — without waiting for a complaint to be filed.

The practical result: dental practices are not in a grey area. They have legal obligations, and those obligations extend to their websites.

Where Your Real Exposure Lives

Most dental practices have a relatively simple public website — hours, location, a team page, maybe a before-and-after gallery. That's the part most owners think about when accessibility comes up. But there are two areas where the real exposure tends to sit.

Patient portals. If your practice uses an online portal for appointment booking, medical history forms, lab results, or billing, that portal carries significant risk. Portals are often built on third-party platforms, which means the practice didn't build them — but the practice is still legally responsible for whether patients with disabilities can use them. Forms that can't be navigated by keyboard, fields without labels, and session timeouts that don't accommodate users who need more time are all common violations.

Online booking systems. Reservation and scheduling tools embedded on practice websites are a common source of claims. If a patient with a visual or motor impairment cannot independently book an appointment online the way a sighted user can, that creates exposure.

The rest of the site matters too — images without descriptive text, poor colour contrast on menus, PDFs of intake forms that screen readers cannot parse — but the portal and the booking system are where demand letters tend to originate.

What Are the Most Common Violations on Dental Websites?

Based on accessibility scan data across healthcare practice websites, the violations that appear most frequently are:

Missing alt text on images. Dental websites tend to be image-heavy — team photos, before-and-after cases, office tours. Every image needs a text description so that screen reader users understand what they're looking at. A before-and-after photo with no description is completely silent to a blind patient.

Unlabelled form fields. Contact forms, appointment request forms, and patient intake forms frequently have visual labels that aren't programmatically connected to the input field. A sighted user sees "Date of Birth" above a box and fills it in. A screen reader user hears nothing and doesn't know what to type.

PDFs that aren't accessible. Many practices post PDF versions of intake paperwork on their websites. Standard PDFs are often completely unreadable to screen readers — the text is treated as an image. Accessible PDFs require specific tagging that most practices have never applied.

Keyboard navigation failures. Users who can't use a mouse — including many patients with motor disabilities and older patients with reduced dexterity — navigate websites entirely by keyboard. Dropdown menus, modal windows, and custom widgets that only respond to a mouse click lock these users out entirely.

Low colour contrast. Many dental websites use light grey text on white backgrounds for a clean aesthetic. This creates serious readability problems for patients with low vision. WCAG 2.2 — the current accessibility standard — requires a minimum contrast ratio between text and background that a significant number of dental sites fail to meet.

What About Accessibility Widgets?

If you've already installed an accessibility overlay — one of the tools that adds a toolbar to your site claiming to fix accessibility automatically — it's worth knowing that this does not reduce your legal exposure in any meaningful way.

The Federal Trade Commission fined one of the largest overlay providers $1 million in 2025 for falsely claiming their product made sites WCAG-accessible. Data from that same year shows that more than 22% of ADA website lawsuits hit businesses that already had a widget installed. Overlays are widely rejected by the disability community and have been specifically named in litigation.

Real risk reduction means identifying the actual violations on your site and fixing them — not applying a cosmetic layer on top. We wrote more about this in Why Accessibility Overlays Are Getting Businesses Sued.

What Does "Demonstrating Good-Faith Effort" Actually Mean?

No tool or audit can guarantee that a dental practice will never face a legal claim. Anyone who tells you otherwise is not being straight with you. What matters under the law — and what matters to a plaintiff's attorney deciding whether to pursue a claim — is evidence of genuine, documented effort to identify and fix accessibility issues.

That means running regular scans of your website, having a record of violations that were identified, and being able to show that steps were taken to address them. A practice that has never checked its site and has no documentation is in a very different position than one that has a current accessibility report, a remediation history, and a monitoring system in place.

It also means not relying on a widget and calling it done. Courts and regulators have been clear on this point.

What Should a Dental Practice Do Right Now?

Start by understanding what's actually on your site. You cannot fix problems you haven't identified. A scan of your public-facing website — and if possible, your patient portal — will tell you what violations exist, how severe they are, and what to fix first.

From there, share the report with whoever manages your website. Most critical violations — missing alt text, unlabelled form fields, contrast issues — are straightforward fixes for an experienced web developer, often resolved in a few hours. The goal is documented progress, not overnight perfection.

Then set up monitoring. Websites change. Platforms update. New content gets added. A booking widget gets replaced. Each of those changes is an opportunity to introduce new violations. Automated monitoring means you're alerted when something breaks, rather than finding out from a demand letter.

If you're not sure where to start, our guide for small business owners on ADA website lawsuits covers the legal landscape in plain English.

This Is About More Than Lawsuits

Margaret eventually rescheduled her cleaning. She's still a patient. But she had to work harder than she should have to stay one — and she has no idea that the practice that's cared for her teeth for eleven years never thought to check whether she could use their portal.

One in four Americans lives with a disability. Among patients over 65 — a core demographic for most dental practices — that number is closer to two in five. An inaccessible patient portal isn't just a legal risk. It's a closed door for a significant share of the people you're trying to serve.

Accessibility isn't a compliance checkbox. It's a decision about who gets to be your patient.

See how your dental practice website scores — free scan, no sign-up required.
[Run your free accessibility scan → https://accessbridge.app/demo]

A note from Laura: I want to be honest that AccessBridge is a business, and we benefit when dental practices use our tool. But we also genuinely believe that the portal experience Margaret had — and the millions like it — is a solvable problem. If you're a disabled patient, an accessibility professional, or anyone who thinks we've got something wrong here, I'd really like to hear from you.

Sources

ADA Title III case law: Robles v. Domino's Pizza (9th Cir. 2019); Gil v. Winn-Dixie (11th Cir. 2021)

AccessBridge identifies accessibility issues to support your remediation process. We are not a law firm and do not provide legal advice or guarantee legal compliance.