Accessibility as an obligation and an advantage

Who this is for

The population that benefits from accessible design is much broader than the population that identifies as disabled. It includes anybody reading on a phone in bright sunlight, anybody whose near vision has changed, anybody with a temporary injury, and anybody trying to read carefully about a medical procedure while anxious.

For an aesthetic clinic, a substantial share of the patient population is in at least one of those groups at any given moment. Accessibility here is not an edge case; it is the main case, poorly served.

The obligation

In the United Kingdom, service providers have duties under the Equality Act 2010 to make reasonable adjustments, and that extends to the services a business provides online. Separate, stricter regulations apply to public sector bodies, which most clinics are not, but the general duty applies to everyone.

The practical standard everybody works to is WCAG, and the W3C's tutorials are the most usable entry point for somebody who is not a developer. This course does not attempt to teach the standard; it teaches the seven checks that catch most of what goes wrong on a clinic site.

Seven checks

1. Colour contrast. Light grey text on white is the single most common failure on clinic sites, usually chosen because it looks refined. It is unreadable to a substantial number of your visitors.
2. Resizable text. The page must remain usable when text is enlarged. Fixed heights and text inside images both break this.
3. Meaningful alternative text on images that carry information, and empty alternative text on images that are purely decorative.
4. Real form labels, not placeholder text used as a label, which disappears the moment somebody starts typing.
5. Keyboard operability. Everything reachable and usable without a mouse, with a visible focus indicator.
6. Logical heading order. One H1, then H2s and H3s in a sensible hierarchy, which is what a screen reader uses to navigate a long treatment page.
7. Captions on video, and a transcript where the video contains information not available elsewhere.

Alternative text, properly

Alternative text describes what the image conveys in context, not what is in the frame. A photograph of a consulting room on a page about what to expect is described as the consulting room where consultations take place. The same photograph in a decorative band at the top of the homepage carries no information and should have empty alternative text so that a screen reader passes over it.

Two failures are common. Describing the file rather than the meaning, which produces a string of words nobody needs. And stuffing the alternative text with search terms, which is both useless to the person relying on it and specifically identified as a poor practice in Google's image guidance.

Forms and keyboards

The enquiry form is where accessibility failures cost a clinic money directly. A form with placeholder text instead of labels, no visible focus, and error messages that appear only as red outlines is a form that a proportion of visitors cannot complete.

The keyboard test takes three minutes. Put the mouse down, press tab repeatedly from the top of the page, and try to reach and complete the enquiry form. If you cannot see where you are, or cannot reach something, neither can a substantial number of visitors. Module 30, Enquiry forms, phone and messaging deals with the rest of the form design.

Reading measure and type size

Two typographic decisions do more for readability than any accessibility plugin. Body text large enough to read without effort, which on a modern screen means larger than most clinic sites use. And a line length constrained to roughly sixty to seventy five characters, which is why this page is set the way it is.

Clinic sites frequently set small grey text across the full width of a wide screen, which produces a line of well over a hundred characters. It looks minimal in a design mock-up and it is close to unreadable in practice, particularly for the very readers most likely to book.

Why this improves search

Not because there is an accessibility ranking factor. Because the same properties are what makes a page legible to a machine: a logical heading structure, text that exists as text rather than inside an image, descriptive link text, and content that is present without interaction.

Every accessibility improvement in this module is also a legibility improvement, and legibility is what every other module in this course has been about.

This is the last module of Part V, and it is a good place to notice the pattern. The technical work in this part is not a separate discipline from the writing in Part III and Part IV. It is the same work, expressed in markup rather than in sentences.