A cracked button on a clothing site is a lost sale. Someone shrugs, opens a new tab, buys the sweater somewhere else. The same bug on a patient portal or a banking login page is a different kind of problem entirely - it's a person locked out of their prescription refill, or unable to see whether their rent payment cleared.
That difference is exactly why regulators in both sectors have been paying closer attention. Healthcare and financial services already operate under heavier compliance obligations than almost any other industry, and when accessibility complaints land on a regulator's desk, they don't start from scratch. They start by checking for the same handful of failures, over and over, because those failures show up constantly and because they map so cleanly onto real harm.
We've run enough sector-specific audits to know the pattern by heart. It's rarely one catastrophic bug that triggers a complaint. It's almost always one of three specific, well-documented failure types - and once you know what they are, you can find them on your own site in an afternoon.
The Stat: The CDC reports that roughly 1-in-4 (28.7%) of US adults have some type of disability, a population that disproportionately relies on both healthcare and financial services websites. (Source: CDC)
Why These Two Sectors Get Grouped Together
Healthcare and financial services don't look alike on the surface. One is built around HIPAA and patient trust, the other around KYC forms and fraud controls. But from an accessibility standpoint, they share a structural trait that shopping sites and blogs don't: almost every meaningful interaction requires filling out a form, reading a disclosure, and passing through some kind of gated modal (consent screen, two-factor prompt, terms acceptance) before you can act.
That structure is exactly where the same three failures keep reappearing.
Failure 1: Unlabeled Form Fields
Patient intake forms and account-application forms both tend to be long, dense, and built in a hurry by whoever owns the backend integration rather than the design team. The result is a recurring pattern: input fields that look labeled to a sighted user (placeholder text, a nearby heading) but have no programmatic label a screen reader can announce.
WCAG 3.3.2 Labels or Instructions exists specifically for this. A field with no <label>, no aria-label, and no aria-describedby connection isn't a minor omission on an intake or application form - it's the difference between a patient completing their medical history and a patient abandoning the form because they can't tell what a field is asking for.
Failure 2: Low-Contrast Disclosure Text
Here's the pattern we see constantly in composite testing: the primary content of a page (headlines, calls to action, navigation) passes contrast checks fine. Then you get to the fine print - dosage instructions, side-effect warnings, fee schedules, APR disclaimers - and it's set two font sizes smaller and several shades lighter than everything around it.
That's exactly the situation WCAG 1.4.3 Contrast (Minimum) is designed to catch, and it's a particularly dangerous place for it to fail, because disclosure text is often the legally required part of the page. If a person with low vision can't read the dosage warning or the fee disclosure, the page has failed at the one job that mattered most.
Failure 3: Keyboard Traps in Modals
Patient portals and online banking platforms both love a modal dialog: confirm your identity, accept these terms, review this statement before you continue. Many of these are built as custom JavaScript overlays rather than following the documented ARIA dialog pattern, and that shortcut is where things go wrong.
WCAG 2.1.2 No Keyboard Trap requires that a keyboard user can always tab or escape their way out of any component they've tabbed into. When a custom modal doesn't manage focus correctly, a keyboard-only user can get stuck inside it entirely, unable to close it, unable to reach the rest of the page, unable to finish the very task the modal was gatekeeping.
The Three Failures, Side by Side
| Failure | Success Criterion | Where it shows up |
|---|---|---|
| Unlabeled form fields | 3.3.2 Labels or Instructions (A) | Patient intake forms, account applications |
| Low-contrast disclosure text | 1.4.3 Contrast (Minimum) (AA) | Dosage instructions, fee schedules |
| Keyboard traps | 2.1.2 No Keyboard Trap (A) | Portal logins, banking modal dialogs |
If you want a quick self-check before anything formal, run through this:
- Every field on your intake or application form has a real programmatic label, not just placeholder text
- Disclosure and disclaimer text meets the same contrast ratio as your primary content
- Every modal on your site can be closed and exited using only the Tab and Escape keys
- Focus returns to a sensible location after a modal closes
- Someone on your team has actually tested these flows with a keyboard alone, no mouse
We go deeper on the legal side of this in our deeper look at patient portal accessibility lawsuits, which covers why this specific corner of healthcare has become one of the fastest-growing categories of accessibility complaints. The same underlying dynamics apply to fintech; the population affected, per the CDC's disability and health data page, is simply too large for either sector to treat this as a niche edge case.
Where to Go From Here
None of these three failures require a redesign. A mislabeled field, a low-contrast disclosure paragraph, and a poorly built modal are all fixable in isolation, usually without touching your visual design at all. What they require is someone who knows to look for them in the specific places healthcare and fintech sites hide them.
If you'd like a second set of eyes on your intake forms, disclosures, and modals, you can get a sector-aware audit for your site and find out exactly where these three failures are showing up on yours, before a regulator or a complaint finds them for you.