The person blocked by your patient portal is often the person least able to work around it. Accessibility here is not a conversion problem, it is whether someone gets care.
Nobody arrives at a patient portal casually. They are unwell, medicated, anxious, on a phone in a waiting room, or acting on behalf of someone who cannot act for themselves.
Post-operative tremor, blurred vision from medication, one hand holding a child. Temporary conditions hit the same barriers as permanent ones, and your users have them by definition.
Caregivers and family members use the portal on behalf of someone who cannot. They are often older, less confident, and using assistive technology themselves.
When self-serve fails, the patient phones or attends in person. That is measurable operational cost on top of the access failure, and it lands on your call centre.
01 · Ranked by care, not severity
limena scores by what a person cannot complete and whether another route exists. A blocked prescription refill has a clinical consequence. A contrast issue on a health article does not.
Forms are almost always the surface that matters, and almost always the least tested.
A rejected refill gives no announced reason. The patient does not know the request failed.
Only self-serve route to an appointment. Fallback is an 11 minute call.
Content is available elsewhere and reflows fine at 200 percent zoom.
02 · Consequence, not category
limena states the fallback: a phone queue, a trip to reception, or nothing. That is the language a clinical operations lead can act on, and it is also what shows up in a complaint.
Findings that need human judgment are flagged for your specialist rather than passed as automated.
Error
The calendar is built from unlabelled div elements. A screen reader announces a grid of bare numbers with no month, no day names, and no indication of which dates are available. There is no text field fallback.
Care impact
Booking is the only self-serve route to an appointment. Blocked patients fall back to the phone line, at an average 11 minute assisted call, or do not book at all.
03 · Beyond the portal
Discharge summaries, results letters, consent forms, and digital product labeling are documents, and they are held to the same standard as the portal that delivers them. limena reads every page of every file rather than sampling, because a consent form can fail on the page with the signature block.
All four trace to two export templates. Fixing those clears 1,612 files on the next generation.
It is the form most patients have to get through, and the one most likely to be blocking someone today.