You didn’t build your website to exclude anyone. That’s not who you are, and it’s not why you got into this work.
You brief your clients on consent. You think carefully about the language on your intake forms. You’ve probably removed weight from your initial assessment questions, or rewritten them entirely. You’ve built a practice that tries to meet people where they are.
And then someone using a screen reader lands on your website and hits a wall.
Not because you don’t care. Because nobody told you this was something to care about — and the person who built your site didn’t build it in. The same way you’d expect a builder to know that a new ramp needs a specific gradient, you had every right to expect your web designer to know that your booking button needs a label a screen reader can announce. That’s not your specialist knowledge. It was supposed to be theirs.
This is an industry problem. But it lands on your website.
What the gap actually is
Accessibility on the web has a formal standard — WCAG AA. It covers things like colour contrast ratios, alt text on images, keyboard navigation, form labels, and heading structure. None of it is obscure. All of it is testable. And the vast majority of wellness websites fail it.
Not because the practitioners are careless. Because accessibility has been treated as optional, advanced, or someone else’s problem — by developers, by platform companies, by the industry at large.
The result is that the spaces wellness practitioners have built online routinely exclude:
- People with low vision who need sufficient colour contrast to read text
- Blind users relying on screen readers who need images described and forms labelled
- People with motor impairments who navigate by keyboard rather than mouse
- Deaf users who need captions on video content
- People with cognitive disabilities who need clear structure and plain language
These are not edge cases. Disability affects a significant portion of the population. And in body-positive wellness specifically — a space that explicitly centres people who have been excluded, harmed, or underserved by mainstream health culture — the irony of an inaccessible website is not small.
The values gap
Here’s the thing about body-positive practice: it tends to attract clients who have been failed before. By practitioners who didn’t account for their body. By systems that weren’t built with them in mind. By spaces that said everyone welcome and meant something narrower.
Your website is the first thing she encounters. Before she reads your about page, before she books a call, before she decides whether to trust you — she finds out whether your site works for her body.
If it doesn’t, she doesn’t email to ask why. She leaves. And she’s had enough of spaces that weren’t built for her to bother explaining it.
The values gap isn’t a character flaw. It’s a gap between what you believe and what your tech is doing on your behalf. Closing it is part of the work — and it’s the part your web designer should be leading.
What to do with this
If you don’t know whether your site is accessible, you can run a free audit at WAVE — paste in your URL and it will show you what’s failing and why. It won’t catch everything, but it will catch the most common issues.
If your current site has accessibility failures, that’s not a reason to panic or rebuild from scratch. Most issues are fixable. What matters is that you know, and that accessibility becomes a requirement — not a nice-to-have — for any future build.
At Matriarch, WCAG AA compliance is non-negotiable on every site we build. It’s not an add-on. It’s in the standard because it was always supposed to be.
A practical guide to what accessible actually looks like on a wellness website — including what your venue page needs to say for clients with access needs — is coming next. And there’s a free checklist.
Janelle — Matriarch Studio buildwithmatriarch.com