Accessibility Monitoring
The patients who can't use your website don't call to tell you.
They hit a form they can't complete, a phone number they can't reach, a booking button their screen reader never announces — and they go somewhere else. You never see it happen, because the site works fine for you. Sometimes what arrives instead is a letter from a firm that has never been to your practice.
The problem
What a broken page sounds like
Accessibility failures are invisible to the person who owns the site. They are not subtle at all to the person using a screen reader. These are real findings from real medical practice websites, described the way a patient encounters them.
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An untitled review widgetThe embedded reviews block — the social proof you paid for — has no accessible name.
Announced as"frame"
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An unnamed map link on the contact pageThe link to directions is an image with no text alternative.
Announced as"link"
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A form field with no labelThe label is styled text sitting next to the input, not attached to it.
Announced as"edit, blank"
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A carousel that lies about itselfThe slider declares its wrapper a list, but the slides inside aren't list items. Assistive technology is told one structure and handed another.
Resultnavigation breaks mid-component
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Text over a hero photo at 3.1:1Below the 4.5:1 minimum. Readable to you on a calibrated monitor indoors; not readable to a 68-year-old on a phone in a parking lot.
Resultthe headline is decoration, not information
Why you don't already know
Three reasons this stays hidden
Your site works for you
You built it, you know where everything is, and you navigate with a mouse and good vision. Every test you personally run passes. That is exactly why the problem survives.
The one-off audit expires
A report from eighteen months ago describes a site that no longer exists. A theme update, a new landing page, a plugin, a fresh batch of blog posts — each one can introduce failures nobody re-checked.
Most scans check the wrong pages
An automated tool that takes whatever the sitemap lists first will spend its budget on blog posts and never open the page a patient actually converts on. It returns a good grade, which is worse than returning nothing.
We know, because ours did it too
The first time we ran our own engine against a real practice site, it came back 93/100, grade A. It had drained the blog sitemap first and filled seven of eight slots with articles. It never opened the consultation page.
We fixed the page discovery to spread across every child sitemap and prioritize the conversion path, then ran the identical site again: 66/100, grade C, five distinct issue types — including the untitled review widget and the unnamed map link above. There is now a regression test named after that failure so it cannot come back.
A scan that skips the pages a patient converts on is not evidence of anything. If a vendor hands you a clean report, the first question is which pages they opened.
The popular answer, and why we refuse it
The overlay widget is one line of JavaScript and a false floor
The most heavily marketed fix is a script that drops a small accessibility toolbar onto your site and promises to handle the rest. It is cheap, it installs in a minute, and it is the reason many practices believe this is already solved.
Overlays sit on top of the markup rather than repairing it. Disability advocacy organizations campaign against them, plaintiff firms specifically track the sites that run them, and installing one has not reliably stopped litigation — in some cases the presence of an overlay and the claims made about it become part of the complaint. Consential does not install an overlay, and never will. Our approach is scan, document, remediate: find the real defect, write it down with a date, and tell your team exactly how to fix it in the platform you actually run.
What Consential does
A scan on a schedule, and a dated record of what you knew and when.
Every cycle opens your site in a real browser, checks it against WCAG 2.1 A and AA, and produces an evidence report with your domain and a timestamp on it. Nobody on your team has to run it, remember it, or interpret it.
A real browser, not a source-code guess
Pages are rendered and tested the way a visitor loads them, so defects introduced by your theme, your builder, and your embedded third-party widgets are all in scope.
The conversion path first
Page discovery fans out across every child sitemap with a per-sitemap cap, then prioritizes the homepage, service and procedure pages, contact, and booking. Blog templates are covered once, not fifty times.
Guidance for the platform you run
Findings come with remediation instructions written separately for WordPress, GoHighLevel, Next.js, and generic sites — where the setting lives, not a link to the spec.
Scored honestly, or not scored at all
Only WCAG A and AA rules affect the score. Advisory best-practice items are reported separately and never counted, because inflating the number makes the evidence less credible, not more. Items the scanner can't decide automatically are flagged for human review instead of quietly passed.
Boundaries, stated up front
What this does not do
Every vendor in this category overpromises. Here is the list we hold ourselves to, in writing, before you buy anything.
- Does not certify or guarantee conformance with the ADA, WCAG, or any other standard. No automated tool can — automated testing catches a meaningful share of defects, not all of them.
- Does not indemnify your practice or defend a claim.
- Does not install an overlay, toolbar, or any widget that alters how your site renders.
- Does not replace legal counsel or a manual audit performed by a human tester using assistive technology.
- Does not scan pages behind a login, including patient portals.
- Does not apply the fixes for you. Remediation guidance is included; the change is made by whoever maintains your site.
Why the report is the product
The value here is not a grade. It is a dated, specific record showing what your site's condition was on a given cycle, what changed since the last one, and what was done about it — the difference between we never looked and we look every cycle and act on what we find. Consential is accessibility infrastructure; it is not a law firm, does not provide legal advice, and using it does not by itself satisfy any regulation. See the full Risk Disclosure.
Find out what your site does to a patient who can't see it
Run your own domain and get named, specific findings — the element, the page, the rule it breaks, and what it takes to fix. No estimate, no lead form ahead of the answer.