Designing a hearing practice website for a seventy-year-old

Most websites are designed by people in their thirties, reviewed by people in their forties, and screenshotted for a portfolio. A hearing practice website is used by someone past seventy, on a phone, holding it at arm's length, quite possibly with the exact sensory impairment the practice treats and frequently with reduced fine motor control as well.

This is the rare situation where doing the accessible thing and doing the commercially optimal thing are not in tension at all. They are the same list.

Type size is a conversion lever

The default body size on most agency-built sites is between fourteen and sixteen pixels. For a presbyopic reader that is genuinely hard work, and hard work on a page someone is not committed to produces an exit, not a squint.

Seventeen to nineteen pixels for body copy, generous line height, and a hard floor on small text. Disclaimers, footers and form hints are where sites cheat, and they are exactly where an older reader gives up. Nothing below fourteen pixels, anywhere, ever.

The phone number is the primary conversion

This audience calls. They do not fill in forms, they do not open chat widgets, and a chat bubble that slides up over the content is actively costing money. The number needs to be visible without scrolling, tappable, and written as a number rather than as an icon.

One specific trap: dynamic number insertion for call tracking. Done carelessly it replaces the number after the page paints, which means a screen reader may announce one number while the visual shows another, and a slow connection can leave the wrong number visible for seconds. It is fixable, but it has to be done deliberately.

Tap targets and the unsteady hand

The published guidance floor is 24 by 24 pixels, and the practical floor for this audience is closer to 48. Adjacent links in a navigation row, tightly stacked footer lists, and small close buttons on modals are the three places a mistap turns into a lost visit.

• 48 pixel minimum on anything tappable, with real spacing between adjacent targets
• No hover-dependent navigation — a touch user cannot hover, and a shaky finger triggers the wrong item
• Forms at four fields or fewer, with labels above the field rather than inside it as placeholder text
• No time-limited interactions, no auto-advancing carousels, no modals that appear on exit intent

Contrast is measured, not eyeballed

Light grey text on white is the single most common failure and the easiest to fix. The AA threshold is 4.5 to 1 for body text. Most tasteful agency palettes fail it somewhere, usually in the places nobody checked: placeholder text, disabled states, the footer, and captions under images.

Check it with a tool rather than an opinion. A palette that fails for an older reader is failing for the entire audience of a practice whose patients are, by definition, sensory-impaired.

Video needs captions, obviously

It is worth stating plainly because it is missed constantly. A hearing practice publishing an uncaptioned video about hearing loss is making an argument about how much it has thought about its patients, and the argument is not flattering. Auto-generated captions are a starting point and need correcting — clinical terms are exactly what automatic transcription gets wrong.

A practice that treats sensory impairment should not have a website that requires unimpaired senses to use.

The thing that is hardest to say

Some very handsome websites are unusable by the people they are meant to serve. Thin light type, low-contrast greys, tiny interface labels, animation on scroll, and a chat widget covering the phone number can all be defended aesthetically and are all, for this audience, expensive.

The good news is that the constraint produces better design rather than worse. Large clear type, generous spacing, high contrast, one obvious action per screen — that is not a compromise. That is just confident design, and it happens to be the version that books appointments.