As we mark Global Accessibility Awareness Day, the UK care sector faces a reckoning, the digital tools reshaping home care and community health services are, for too many disabled and older people, simply out of reach.

The Day That Forces An Uncomfortable Question

Every third Thursday in May, Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) prompts professionals across technology, health, and public services to ask a deceptively simple question, are the digital tools we are building actually usable by the people who need them most?

Now in its 15th year, GAAD was founded to get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital access and inclusion for the more than one billion people worldwide living with disabilities. In the UK, roughly one in five people have a disability of some kind. Within home care and social care settings, that proportion is considerably higher.

A Sector Digitising At Speed But Leaving People Behind

Remote monitoring, digital care records, app-based care coordination, and virtual consultations have moved from pilot projects into mainstream provision. But access and accessibility are not the same thing.

NHS England’s framework on inclusive digital healthcare acknowledges that while 78 per cent of disabled people say digital technologies are helpful or very helpful, poor design can actively harm people’s experience of healthcare. A 2024 analysis by WebAIM found that over 95 per cent of the top one million home pages had detectable failures against Web Content Accessibility Guidelines demonstrating that despite mature standards and freely available testing tools, accessible design remains far from routine

For someone accessing a social care self-assessment portal or a remote health monitoring dashboard from their own home, these failures are not abstract technical shortcomings. They are barriers to care.

The Stakes In Social Care

The King’s Fund has highlighted that digital exclusion clusters around the same groups most likely to be receiving care: older people, people with disabilities, and those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Research published earlier this year suggests that as many as five million UK citizens could be effectively invisible to digital services by 2035, with nearly half of women over 75 currently remaining offline.

Providing devices or wi-fi without ensuring the software running on them is genuinely accessible screen reader-compatible, cognitively navigable risks deepening isolation rather than alleviating it. For care providers deploying digital tools in people’s homes, accessibility compliance is not a box-ticking exercise. It is a clinical and ethical responsibility.

What Good Practice Looks Like

Lambeth Council launched what was described as the UK’s first Assistive Technology Assessment Centre in Brixton in 2025, giving residents with disabilities the opportunity to explore tools and receive expert guidance. Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council deployed the ReciteMe assistive toolbar on its website, with the screen reader function translating on-screen content into audible speech or Braille becoming its most-used feature. These are instructive examples, but they remain islands of good practice in an inconsistent landscape.

This year, Digital Accessibility Week 2026 ran as a cross-government event from 18 to 21 May, focused specifically on designing, developing, and delivering accessible digital services, a theme that speaks directly to what care technology providers, NHS commissioners, and local authorities are facing.

What Needs To Change

For care providers and the technology companies supplying them, GAAD is a prompt to move beyond awareness. That means writing accessibility requirements into procurement specifications from the start, involving disabled people in co-design, and ensuring care workers can support clients in navigating digital health tools.

The GAAD Foundation has set its mission as disrupting the culture of technology development to include accessibility as a core requirement not a compliance afterthought. That principle applies equally to home care technology, telehealth platforms, and digital social care services.

The trajectory of UK health and care is unmistakably digital. The question is not whether technology will reshape home care and community services it already is. The question is whether that reshaping will be inclusive by design, or whether disabled and older people will once again find themselves navigating systems built without them in mind.