Opinion: Hospitals need to make their websites as accessible as their physical spaces
It would be anathema for a health care facility in the U.S. to have a main entrance that’s not physically accessible to all people. Yet many of their digital front doors block people with disabilities. They need to change that.
More than 30 years after the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law with the aim of removing obstacles to people who are blind, deaf, or have other physical or mental disabilities, the digital landscape continues to erect barriers to access. An investigation by Kaiser Health News in 2021 showed that nearly all of the Covid-19 vaccine registration websites reviewed weren’t accessible to people who are blind, a major violation of disability rights laws in the middle of a public health emergency.
