Primary research
Contractor websites that lock out people with disabilities
These are the faults that stop somebody using a page at all rather than merely annoying them. A button a screen reader announces as just "button", so a blind customer cannot tell what it does. A photo carrying real information with no text description behind it. A form box with no label attached, so the software reading it aloud cannot say what to type. We count a business once if any page on its site has at least one.
Two reasons to care, and the second one is the bigger number. First, accessibility on websites is law in Ontario and in several US states, and the letters demanding money over it go to small businesses, not just to big ones. Second, and this is the part people miss, the same faults that lock out a screen reader also make the page harder for everybody else: the low-contrast phone number nobody can read outdoors, the button too small to hit with a work glove on. That is a much larger group than you would guess, and none of them ring you to complain.
The number by trade
| Trade | Sites people with disabilities cannot use | Brands | Scope |
|---|---|---|---|
| Roofing | 60.8% | 130 | all captured pages |
| Remodeling | 59.6% | 146 | all captured pages |
| HVAC | 64.4% | 104 | all captured pages |
So the spread runs from remodeling at 59.6% to HVAC at 64.4%. Which trade you work in changes what "normal" looks like, so read your own trade's page rather than the combined number.
Roofing
Roofing sits fractionally under the combined rate, which sounds like good news until you notice what the sites have in common. The recurring failure is the gallery: a wall of project photos, no alternative text on any of them, and a lightbox that traps keyboard focus once it opens. Roofing sells on proof, and the proof block is the part a screen reader cannot get to.
Full roofing breakdown for this metric
Remodeling
Remodeling posts the lowest critical rate of the three trades, and it is still nearly three in five brands. The pattern here is different from roofing. Remodeling sites lean on long consultation forms, and unlabelled inputs inside those forms are the single most common critical finding. So the defect is sitting on the page where the money changes hands.
Full remodeling breakdown for this metric
HVAC
HVAC carries the highest critical rate in the study. The likely reason is structural rather than careless: HVAC sites ship more interactive furniture than the other two trades, with booking widgets, financing calculators and chat launchers layered on top of the base template. Every one of those is a third-party script, and third-party scripts are where the unnamed buttons come from.
Check your own site in ten minutes
Search for the free WAVE accessibility checker, paste in your quote page address rather than your homepage, and look at the red icons only. Red means somebody genuinely cannot use that part. If there are none, run it again on your busiest service page, because that is normally where the problems hide.
- What was measured
- Share of brands with at least one critical violation across captured pages.
- How we measured it
- We opened every page we could reach on each site and ran a free accessibility checker over it, the same kind you can run yourself in a browser, then counted only the faults it rates as blocking.
- The technical version, for anyone checking our work
- axe-core 4.10.2 WCAG 2.1 AA, evidence-verified, >=1 critical on any captured page
- Sample
- 380 contractor brands. Roofing 130, remodeling 146, HVAC 104.
- Collection window
- 2026-05-10 to 2026-05-16
- Combined aggregation
- weighted (sum of per-trade brand counts over sum of cohort sizes)
- Who ran it
- Fervor Studio, first-party capture. Nobody paid to be included or excluded.
How the sites were picked, captured and scored: the methodology. Every metric we publish: the research index.
The full reports this measurement came out of: State of Roofing, State of Remodeling, and State of HVAC.