A site an older patient can actually useWebsite optimization and accessibility for audiologists

The one category where accessibility is the conversion rate

Usually accessibility work is argued for on ethical and legal grounds and grudgingly funded. Here the same list of fixes is the highest-return conversion work available, because the audience the fixes are for is the entire audience.

Type size is a lever, not a preference

Fourteen to sixteen pixel body copy is standard and is genuinely hard work for a presbyopic reader. Hard work on a page nobody is committed to produces an exit rather than a squint. Seventeen to nineteen pixels, generous line height, and a hard floor of fourteen everywhere — including footers, disclaimers and form hints, which is exactly where sites cheat and exactly where an older reader gives up.

The phone number is the primary conversion

This audience calls. They do not fill in forms and 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 hidden behind an icon.

One specific trap: dynamic number insertion for call tracking, done carelessly, replaces the number after paint. A screen reader can announce one number while the screen shows another, and on a slow connection the wrong number is visible for seconds. It is fixable and it has to be done deliberately.

Targets, forms and motion

• Forty-eight pixel minimum on anything tappable, with real spacing between adjacent targets
• No hover-dependent navigation, because a touch user cannot hover and an unsteady finger triggers the wrong item
• Four fields or fewer, labels above the field rather than inside it as placeholder text
• No auto-advancing carousels, no exit-intent modals, no time-limited interactions
• Captions on every video, corrected rather than auto-generated, since clinical terms are what transcription gets wrong

Contrast is measured, not eyeballed

Light grey on white is the most common failure and the easiest fix. AA is 4.5 to 1 for body text, and most tasteful agency palettes fail somewhere nobody checked: placeholder text, disabled states, the footer, captions under images. We measure every pair rather than judging by eye, on the reasonable grounds that a palette failing for an older reader is failing for a practice whose patients are sensory-impaired by definition.

Friction past the click

The audit does not stop at the website. If the scheduler demands an account, a date of birth and an insurance ID before it will offer a slot, the site is not the problem. That path gets timed and written down, and the fix is frequently a change to the booking configuration rather than to a page.