98.1% across the 104 HVAC contractor websites we inspected.

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.

That puts HVAC above the combined figure of 95.8% across all 380 brands , by 2.3 percentage points. Here is the same measurement in the other two trades we inspected.

Trade	Sites that are hard to use for the disabled	Sites
HVAC (this page)	98.1%	104
Roofing	97.7%	130
Remodeling	92.5%	146

Why it costs you work

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.

Checking your own HVAC site

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.

Everything else we measured on HVAC sites

Measurement	HVAC
Sites people with disabilities cannot use	64.4%
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 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
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 that are hard to use for the disabled. 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.