New Web Accessibility Requirements Coming: Are You Ready?

Andy Gradel, system director, digital marketing at Main Line Health

What if 20 percent of your website visitors were prevented from fully engaging with your content, or found it just too frustrating to spend much time on your site? Web design has come a long way toward making digital experiences more consumer-friendly, personalized, and mobile-friendly. But unless you’ve experienced what it’s like to interact with web content without the benefit of one of your senses, you can’t fully appreciate how challenging it can be for people with disabilities.

Web accessibility is more than just “the right thing to do.” For hospitals and other covered entities, it’s the law, and compliance with new regulations will be mandated as of early 2018.

How accessible is your hospital’s website?

Main Line Health in Philadelphia is a good example of a system that had some catching up to do, even after a site redesign.

Andy Gradel is system director, digital marketing at Main Line Health. After leading a major overhaul and relaunch of the system’s enterprise website, he got a call from the compliance department asking if the website met the newly established requirements for web accessibility. “When I logged into Siteimprove’s Accessibility Checker and really started playing around with the site, I was shocked to find that we weren’t even batting .400,” he says. Four hundred might be a great batting average, but on a website, it indicates that there’s room for improvement.

In our new story, we share some details about Main Line Health’s journey in this area, along with what you need to know to conform to accessibility guidelines.

Read it now: How Accessible Is Your Website?

Best regards,
Matt Humphrey
President