Primary research
Contractor websites that are hard work for disabled customers
These sit one step below the ones that block a page outright. They do not stop somebody dead, they just make everything harder. Text too pale against its background to read. Links that say "click here" so a screen reader user hears a list of identical links with no idea where any of them go. Headings jumbled so the shape of the page falls apart when it is read aloud.
This is the number that makes the whole conversation uncomfortable, because it is close enough to everybody that being average stops being a defence. And the pale-text problem is not theoretical. If your phone number is set in light grey on a white background, the customer standing in their driveway at noon holding a phone cannot read it, and they are not going to squint. They are going to ring somebody else.
The number by trade
| Trade | Sites that are hard to use for the disabled | Brands | Scope |
|---|---|---|---|
| Roofing | 97.7% | 130 | all captured pages |
| Remodeling | 92.5% | 146 | all captured pages |
| HVAC | 98.1% | 104 | all captured pages |
So the spread runs from remodeling at 92.5% to HVAC at 98.1%. Which trade you work in changes what "normal" looks like, so read your own trade's page rather than the combined number.
Roofing
Roofing runs above the combined rate. Contrast is the driver, and specifically the habit of setting body copy in a mid grey on an off white background because it looked restrained in the design file. It passed the designer. It does not pass the threshold.
Full roofing breakdown for this metric
Remodeling
Remodeling posts the lowest serious rate of the three, and the gap to the other two is real rather than noise. Remodeling sites tend to be the most recently rebuilt, and newer template systems ship with contrast defaults that clear the threshold out of the box. So this is one place where paying for a rebuild demonstrably bought something.
Full remodeling breakdown for this metric
HVAC
HVAC is the worst of the three on serious violations, and it is worst on critical too. When one trade leads both severities, the cause is usually the template rather than the operator. A handful of HVAC-specific site vendors serve a large share of these sites, and their base theme carries the defect into every site built on it.
Check your own site in ten minutes
Same free checker, but look at the orange icons this time. Then do the test no software can do for you: take your phone outside on a bright day, turn the brightness down to half, and try to read your own phone number and your own quote button. If you have to squint, so does everybody else.
- What was measured
- Share of brands with at least one serious violation across captured pages.
- How we measured it
- Same accessibility checker, same pages, but counting the rung below blocking: the faults that make a page hard work rather than impossible.
- The technical version, for anyone checking our work
- axe-core 4.10.2, >=1 serious 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 trade sample 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.