Running the accessibility pass on a hearing practice website
The one audience where the WCAG checklist and the conversion checklist are the same document.
8 min read
A hearing practice website is used by someone past sixty-five, on a phone, quite possibly presbyopic, and very likely with the exact impairment the practice treats.
This is the rare case where doing the accessible thing and doing the profitable thing are the same list of tasks, which makes the audit easy to justify and easy to sell internally.
- 01
Measure contrast on every pair
4.5 to 1 for body text, 3 to 1 for large text and interface components. Check the places nobody checks: placeholder text, disabled buttons, the footer, captions, and any grey-on-grey card.
Use a tool. Eyeballing contrast is how tasteful palettes ship failing.
- 02
Fix the type scale from the bottom up
Body copy at seventeen to nineteen pixels. A hard floor of fourteen for everything, including legal text and form hints.
Check that the page still works at 200 per cent browser zoom without horizontal scrolling, because a lot of this audience browses zoomed permanently.
- 03
Audit tap targets and spacing
Twenty-four pixels is the published floor; forty-eight is the practical one here. Look specifically at adjacent nav links, stacked footer lists and modal close buttons, which are where a mistap turns into a lost visit.
- 04
Walk the whole site with a keyboard
Tab through every page. Every interactive element must be reachable, must show a visible focus ring, and must be operable with Enter or Space.
Check that focus is not trapped in a modal and that a skip-to-content link exists and works.
- 05
Check the phone number specifically
It must be a real tel link, visible without scrolling, and announced correctly by a screen reader. If dynamic number insertion is running for call tracking, verify that what is announced matches what is displayed, including on a throttled connection.
- 06
Caption every video, then correct the captions
A hearing practice publishing an uncaptioned video is making an argument about how much it has thought about its patients. Auto-generated captions are a starting point and get clinical terms wrong, which is the part that matters.
- 07
Remove the hostile patterns
Auto-advancing carousels, exit-intent modals, chat widgets covering the phone number, hover-only navigation and anything on a timer. Each of these is defensible in general and expensive for this specific audience.
Where this goes wrong
- Running an automated scanner and stopping there — it catches perhaps a third of what matters
- An accessibility overlay widget, which does not fix the underlying site and is a litigation magnet
- Fixing the homepage and leaving the appointment form
- Leaving the scheduler out of scope, when it is frequently the worst offender