64.4% across the 104 HVAC contractor websites we inspected.

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.

That puts HVAC above the combined figure of 61.3% across all 380 brands , by 3.1 percentage points. Here is the same measurement in the other two trades we inspected.

Trade	Sites people with disabilities cannot use	Sites
HVAC (this page)	64.4%	104
Roofing	60.8%	130
Remodeling	59.6%	146

Why it costs you work

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.

Checking your own HVAC site

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.

Everything else we measured on HVAC sites

Measurement	HVAC
Sites that are hard to use for the disabled	98.1%
How long sites take to load on a phone	6.24s
Quote form field count	29.9%
Multi-step forms	1%
Named customer testimonials	52.9%
Before and after galleries	13.5%

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
Scope: all captured pages
Denominator: 104 HVAC brands.
Collection window: 2026-05-10 to 2026-05-16
Who ran it: Fervor Studio, first-party capture. Nobody paid to be included or excluded.

This measurement across every trade: Sites people with disabilities cannot use. How the capture works: the methodology.

The full report behind the HVAC numbers: State of HVAC. Or see how individual HVAC brands scored on the HVAC leaderboard.