Study Finds 90% of UK Care Provider Websites Fail Basic Accessibility Tests
An audit of 750 UK care provider websites has found that 89% contained text that fails international contrast standards, and that only 19 of the 578 sites that could be reached passed every automated accessibility check. The research, published by Social Care Today on 5 October 2026, was conducted in September 2026 by Len Burges, founder of the digital agency TRG Digital.
The study sampled websites at random from a UK care directory, stratified across nursing, residential and home care settings and across regions. About a quarter of the individual pieces of text tested failed the contrast threshold set by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) at AA level. On images, 28% of sites had at least one image with no alt attribute at all, while 76% carried images with an empty alt attribute — a value that is correct for decorative images but, at that volume, points to templates and page builders filling the field automatically.
Enquiry forms, the main route by which families contact providers, were a frequent weak point: 58% of the sites that carried a form had fields with no label tied to them, leaving screen reader users to hear only "edit text". On mobile, 77% of sites had tap targets crowded together, 46% had buttons or links smaller than the recommended minimum, and 33% set text below 12 pixels somewhere on the page.
Of the 578 reachable sites, 17 were running an accessibility toolbar or "listen to page" tool, and every one of those sites still failed at least one of the basic checks, the study found. Separately, 23% of the original 750 addresses could not be reached at all, including 4% that produced a certificate warning, after each failure was checked twice on separate days.
The research is a sponsored feature, and TRG Digital discloses a commercial interest, noting that it builds websites and digital tools for UK care providers and sells a listen-to-page tool. Its full method and aggregate data are published at trgdigital.co.uk. The study measured up to six pages per site, reports a margin of roughly four percentage points, and cautions that automated tests catch only a minority of real accessibility barriers, so the figures should be read as a floor rather than a verdict.
The findings add to a body of recent UK research on digital accessibility gaps, including a separate study of local council websites, and put care providers under pressure to check contrast, form labels and alt text ahead of domestic and European accessibility obligations. The authors recommend that providers start with contrast, then fix enquiry forms, write alt text for meaningful images, and test their own sites on an older phone before trusting a free accessibility score.