Key Takeaways
Over 70 million U.S. adults — more than 1 in 4 — live with a disability. Not a niche audience.
Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, recently updated, is the law most healthcare marketers will actually encounter.
Accessibility is routinely treated as someone else’s job — IT, product, the agency — so no one owns it.
Healthcare marketing is pouring energy into AI visibility while overlooking whether people can even use the sites they find.
Everyone in healthcare — whether you’re serving patients directly or you’re deep in the B2B world — loves to talk about patient outcomes. Patient access. Closing gaps in care. And health equity. But there’s a (loaded) question nobody seems to be asking: how are we supposed to improve access to healthcare if healthcare isn’t even accessible?
Let’s define what we’re actually talking about: accessibility. Under the ADA, a disability is any physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities, including seeing, hearing, walking, learning, concentrating, and caring for oneself. It’s a legal definition, not a medical one, and it’s broader than most people assume.
Worth noting for healthcare marketers specifically: the more directly relevant law is Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which applies to any organization receiving federal funding (pretty much anyone touching Medicare or Medicaid dollars). Significant updates to Section 504 just came down, so this is a good moment to brush up.
And the population living with a disability is bigger than you probably think. According to the CDC, more than 1 in 4 U.S. adults — over 70 million people — reported having a disability in 2022. That’s a significant portion of the very patients we say we’re trying to reach and serve. Add the aging population: prevalence rises from 16% (18–44) to 29% (45–64) to nearly 50% (65+). By 2030, all baby boomers will be older than 65, making 1 in 5 U.S. residents retirement age.
A very wise person (named Phil Yatvin) shared a thought-provoking reality: the disabled community is the only minority group any of us can join at any point in our lives. It’s one you may not be in today, but part of tomorrow.
A conversation with a friend that started everything
A few months ago I was catching up with a dear friend I’ve known since middle school. She works at an organization that serves a large population of individuals living with disabilities. For years she’s been a fierce advocate for making sure their in-person events are fully accessible — and now she’s on a new mission: making sure the digital experience matches. How do people sign up for our accessible events? If someone is vision or hearing impaired, can they easily register?
She described something frustratingly familiar: finger-pointing. Is it IT’s job to make the website and app accessible? Marketing’s? The external agency’s? Everyone’s circling the same problem and nobody’s owning it. But the goal should be the same regardless of who does what: making sure the 70+ million Americans living with a disability have the same access as everyone else.
I went looking for the conversation. It wasn’t there.
After talking with my friend, she asked if I could point her toward resources, communities, or conversations on this topic. So I searched several Slack communities I’m part of, many marketing-focused with a health tech bent. Accessibility. ADA compliance. Digital access. Nothing. The only threads around “accessibility” weren’t about accessibility at all — they were about visibility. How to show up in LLMs. How to rank.
There is something a little hypocritical about spending resources to make your brand more visible in AI search while the person who finds you can’t actually use your website, app, or event registration page. So I posted in Pavilion. One person, Jordan, responded — which led me to Will, who led me to his business partner Phil. What keeps coming up: healthcare (and other industries) are behind the curve on what true accessibility really means. Not out of malice, but we’re not paying attention, and that’s a problem when patients are the end goal.
The healthcare marketing gut check at Swaay
Shortly after, I was at Swaay.Health, one of my favorite healthcare marketing conferences, just outside Boston. I started asking people directly: what do you know about ADA compliance requirements? Company-wide digital accessibility initiatives? Is accessibility a core strategic pillar? Is your conference app accessible? The responses were along the lines of “oh yeah, color contrast, right?” Not wrong, but incomplete. One person was actively making everything accessible — because they receive government funding and are legally obligated. Great, but “we have to” shouldn’t be the only reason.
The data that made my eyes go wide
I pulled the exhibitor lists from ViVE and HIMSS and ran an analysis to look at the most basic indicator: do these healthcare-centric companies even have an accessibility statement? An accessibility statement is table stakes, and yet the percentage without one was astounding. Of 1,243 unique companies, about 7 in 10 (69.9%) had no public accessibility statement at all. Only 1 in 6 (16.5%) maintained a dedicated page. The ones with formal statements were largely the big, established names — Adobe, Microsoft, IBM, Salesforce, Medtronic, Roche. Neither HIMSS nor ViVE has a digital accessibility statement either.
Why accessibility in healthcare (and marketing) matters more than the next AI content trend
There’s a lot of noise in marketing right now — content strategy, AI visibility, LLM optimization. It all matters. But accessibility is the most underserved conversation in healthcare marketing right now, and it’s underserved for an underserved population. If we believe what we say about patient outcomes and closing gaps in care, accessibility cannot be a checkbox, and it cannot be something only government-contracted organizations worry about. It’s tied to corporate strategy and ethos — and marketers often need to raise these opportunities up.
Over the coming weeks and months, I’ll be writing more — a mix of educational content, data, and honest reflections from my own learning curve. If this is already something you’re working on, I’d love to hear from you. And if it’s not on your calendar, May 21 marks Global Accessibility Awareness Day. Stay tuned.
Frequently asked questions
What counts as a disability under the ADA?
Any physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities — seeing, hearing, walking, learning, concentrating, or caring for oneself. It’s a legal definition, and it’s broader than most people assume.
Why should healthcare marketers care about Section 504?
Section 504 applies to any organization receiving federal funding — which covers almost anyone touching Medicare or Medicaid dollars. It’s the accessibility law marketers are most likely to encounter inside their own organizations, and it was recently updated.
Isn’t accessibility just color contrast?
That’s one thread of a much bigger story. Accessibility spans cognition, mobility, vision, and hearing across every digital touchpoint — websites, apps, event registration — not just visual contrast.
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