Every Patient Can Use It

A website every patient can use books more patients. It also happens to be the law.

Accessibility is not paperwork — it is patients who can actually find you, read you and book you. Four federal rules now back that up. Here is each one in plain English, and what it means for your practice.

A clinician explaining a document to a seated patient across a desk.
Three of these four rules are already live. None of them start with a warning letter.
Short answer

What rules apply to an eyecare practice website?

Four federal rules reach an eyecare practice website: the ADA, Section 504 — with website deadlines of May 11, 2027 or May 10, 2028 set by practice size for practices taking Medicare or Medicaid — Section 1557, and HIPAA. Together they mean one thing: every patient can use your website, and patient information is handled with care. OptiSite builds to WCAG 2.2 AA, the standard those rules point at, and re-runs 61 accessibility checks every month.

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A staff member holding a tablet showing website accessibility icons.
A magnifying glass over printed text reading ‘to provide access to vision’.
Why This Exists

Access is the product.

Your practice exists to give people access to vision. The website is where that starts — a patient who cannot read it, navigate it or book on it never becomes a patient. The four rules below are the legal floor under that idea.

One At A Time

What each rule actually says.

None of these are new laws. What changed is that three of them now point at websites specifically, and one of them finally named a technical standard you can be measured against.

Live now · no deadline

The ADA

The Americans with Disabilities Act names "the professional office of a health care provider" as a place that has to be open to everybody. Courts have applied that to websites. There is no small-practice exemption and there is no grace period, because there was never a start date to begin with.

  • 7,961 website accessibility lawsuits have been filed since the start of 2025.
  • 64% of those cases hit businesses making under $25 million a year
  • Nobody inspects you first. One person complains, and a letter arrives at your front desk.
What a claim actually looks like →
Four people at home — on a phone, a desktop computer, a tablet and a laptop — each looking at a health care website.
A clinician holding a direct ophthalmoscope close to a patient's eye during an examination. Live now · with a date attached

Section 504

Health and Human Services published this rule in May 2024. It took effect that July. For the first time it named an actual technical standard — WCAG 2.1 level AA — for the websites and apps of anyone taking federal health care money.

  • HHS's own analysis of the rule estimates 92% of doctors receive federal health care money — which is what pulls a private practice in
  • May 11, 2027 if you have 15 or more employees
  • May 10, 2028 if you have fewer than 15
See the countdown →
A practice receptionist handing a card across the front desk to a patient. Live now · this one is new for practices

Section 1557

This is the health care anti-discrimination rule. For about forty years the government said that being paid through Medicare Part B did not count as taking federal money. In 2024 it changed its mind and said it does.

  • That single change pulled ordinary physician practices in for the first time
  • It is why the Section 504 deadline reaches so much further than it used to
  • It covers communicating with patients who have a disability — including on a screen
Why headcount is not the question →
A patient information form on a clipboard beside a padlock symbol. Live now · a different kind of exposure

HIPAA

An appointment request, a contact form asking why a patient is coming in, a link into the portal — that is a HIPAA surface, and the tracking code sitting on those same pages is where practices get into trouble.

  • Tracking pixel cases against health care providers have run past $100 million in settlements since 2023
  • 2025 set a record for large health care data breaches — 772 reported
  • Most of this is decided by how the site is built, before a patient types a single character
How we close those paths →
The Button On The Side Of The Page

An overlay is not compliance, and now there is a federal order saying so.

You have seen it — the little wheelchair or eye icon that opens a panel of settings. It is sold as one line of code that makes a website compliant. It does not fix the code underneath, which is the only thing a blind patient's software actually reads.

A clinician in scrubs holding a tablet that shows accessibility icons, including a wheelchair symbol and a sign-language symbol.
The panel changes what you see. It does not change what a screen reader hears.
$1Mthe Federal Trade Commission's April 2025 order against a major overlay seller, which is now barred from claiming its automated product makes any website WCAG compliant unless it can prove it
983digital accessibility lawsuits filed in 2025 against websites that already had a widget installed — up from 722 in 2024
1 in 4of all such lawsuits that year were against a site running one of these buttons
16accessibility rules still failing underneath the widget on the real eyecare site we audited

The practice in our audit was paying for a name-brand overlay on all 478 of its pages. See what was underneath it →

Questions, Answered

More on this page's topic

Does the ADA really apply to a small optometry practice website?
In practice, yes. The law names a health care provider's office as a place of public accommodation, and courts have applied that to websites. There is no exemption for being small — 64% of these cases in 2025 were filed against businesses making under $25 million a year. What size does change is how much a claim hurts.
The deadline moved to 2027. Can I wait?
You can, and the risk you are waiting through is not the deadline. Only the date moved. The rule itself has been in effect since July 2024, the government can investigate without a complaint, and the ADA lawsuits that make up almost all health care web accessibility cases were never tied to that date in the first place.
Why did Medicare Part B suddenly matter?
For about forty years the government said Medicare Part B payments were not "federal financial assistance," so a practice paid only through Part B sat outside these rules. In 2024 it reversed that position. That one reinterpretation is what brings ordinary independent practices inside rules that used to be a hospital problem. Whether it reaches your practice is a question for your lawyer.
Which standard should my practice build to, 2.1 or 2.2?
The federal rule names WCAG 2.1 level AA, and it also allows any standard that does the same job or better. WCAG 2.2 AA contains everything in 2.1 AA plus a handful of newer checks, mostly about touch targets and login. Building to 2.2 satisfies the rule as written and means you are not redoing this when the reference moves.
My web company says they handle accessibility. Isn't that enough?
Not as a matter of law. The federal rule makes the practice responsible for web content it provides directly or through a contract, licence or other arrangement — which covers your scheduler, your portal and your bill-pay screens even though a vendor runs them. A contract can define who does the work. It does not move who answers for it. Ask your current company for the audit report and the standard they build to; if they cannot produce one, that is your answer.
Is the 2027 deadline definitely going to hold?
Nobody knows. The extension was challenged in federal court in Maryland on May 21, 2026 by the National Federation of the Blind, which argues it was issued without the public notice and comment the law requires and wants the original dates restored. There has been no ruling. The original date for larger practices was May 11, 2026, which has already passed — so if that challenge succeeds, there is no runway left. A site built to the standard now is covered whichever way it goes.
Four Rules. One Website.

Built for all four from the first line of code.

Independent practices only · $0 until you're live · no contract · re-checked every month

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Free 290+ point audit of your current site.

The same check we run on every site we build. Accessibility, security, AI-search, Google, patient privacy — each item scored on its own. No sales call attached.

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Every finding tied to a rule you can look up

Accessibility, from line one

Built accessible from the first line of code.

Your new website will be built with accessibility engineered into every page. Getting started requires only about two hours of your time. Let's schedule your intake and begin.

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Built to the standard from line one