Website Accessibility in the Healthcare Marketplace

Abstract

There have been reports of people with and without disabilities having issues with the accessibility of these state marketplace websites. In 2014, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was passed, which allowed people that never had insurance, to have insurance for the first time in their lives. Shortly after the ACA was passed, it instructed each state to set up a health insurance marketplace, where people could shop and enroll in health insurance. States that didn’t set up their own site, would use the Federal Marketplace website. The states needed to make sure that all people could access the content on these websites. The states were instructed under the Affordable Care Act, to follow the accessibility guidelines in Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Accessibility is the idea of making websites that can be used by as many people as possible. Identifying accessibility issues with these health insurance marketplace websites before open enrollment has the possibility to help people advocate for their rights and might also make states improve their websites to make it accessible for everyone before the enrollment period. In order to gather quantitative data in terms of how accessible the websites we were studying were, each website was tested using a system of questions to evaluate what was or was not present on the site. Each component of the websites that was tested directly correlated to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 AA Standards. This study aims to consider what accessibility benchmarks are most often overlooked and how that impacts citizens, particularly those with disabilities, looking for healthcare and health insurance coverage.