CivicBinder Health reads the filename of every PDF on a practice's site, and asks whether patients still use it before it asks how old it is

A patient using a screen reader opens the new patient intake form on a practice's website and gets a picture of a page, with no way to tell them which box is the date of birth. The person who has to fix that runs a single location practice, has no accessibility budget, and pays a web vendor by the hour.

CivicBinder Health is Section 1557 website accessibility readiness for health care practices. It scans a practice's public site and delivers a Readiness Binder: the accessibility evaluation, a complete inventory of every document on the site with its status, a Notice of Nondiscrimination and Accessibility Policy prepared for the practice to adopt and post, a public Accessibility Statement with a way for patients to report barriers, and a dated remediation plan written to be handed straight to the practice's web vendor. $299, one time. Multi site and FQHC is $499. A quarterly re-scan that keeps the record current is $19 a month.

The compliance dates under the HHS rule are May 11 2027 for practices with 15 or more employees, and May 10 2028 for smaller ones. OCR extended those dates. It did not repeal them.

Watch the CivicBinder Health demo

The document inventory is the part that gives orders

Most of a binder is findings. The inventory is instructions. Every PDF the crawl finds gets downloaded and opened, and two things are checked inside it: whether the file declares itself as marked up for assistive technology, and whether it actually carries the structure tree that markup promises. Both, or the document counts as untagged, and untagged is what that intake form was.

Then the binder prints one sentence per document telling the vendor what to do with that specific file.

Use, then age

45 CFR 84.85(b) excepts documents that were already on the site before the practice's compliance date, unless they are currently used to apply for, gain access to, or participate in the program. The exception turns on use. A blank new patient intake form sitting at a filename ending in 2019, which patients are still filling in this morning, is fully in scope, and the year in that filename describes when somebody exported it rather than whether anyone still fills it in.

So the ladder asks about use first. The year test only ever sees the files that use did not already claim.

Note what the archive row still says. Even a genuinely dormant document owes a patient an accessible version on request, so the sentence carries that obligation rather than closing the file out.

A practice acting on a work order gets one afternoon of vendor time, priced by the hour. Which line each PDF lands on is what that afternoon buys.

See a binder and what the free preliminary survey covers: https://health.civicbinder.org/hn?utm_campaign=compound

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