What a Hearing Clinic Website Needs

The site is part of the service

Every business should build an accessible site and most can treat it as work to get around to.

A hearing clinic cannot, because the people it serves are the people its site most easily excludes.

A video without captions on a hearing clinic's home page is not an oversight; it is a statement about how much thought went into the practice.

Visitors notice it, and the ones who notice most are exactly the ones you want.

The specific items that matter here

• Captions on every video.
• A transcript below each one.
• Text large enough by default.
• Contrast that works in bright light.
• A route to contact that is not a telephone.

The fifth is the one most clinics miss entirely. A practice serving people with hearing loss whose only contact route is a telephone number has a problem it has never noticed.

Offer a way to make contact without calling

Which for this practice is not a convenience, it is access.

A form, an email address, and ideally a text number, each shown as prominently as the telephone number.

Say which one gets answered fastest, so somebody is not choosing blindly.

Where you can, offer a way to book without any conversation, since the telephone call itself is the barrier for a proportion of your patients.

Say plainly that you are happy to correspond by writing, which nobody says and which matters to somebody deciding whether to make contact at all.

That single sentence is worth considerably more than a whole page about your equipment.

The questions that arrive by phone

Which the site should answer first.

Do I need a referral.

What does a test cost, and is it covered.

How long does an appointment take.

What do hearing aids actually cost.

And can somebody come with me.

The fourth is the one everybody avoids answering and everybody wants to know.

Say something about cost

Which this field resists more than most.

Hearing aids vary enormously by technology level, and the reason given for saying nothing is that a range is misleading.

A range is considerably less misleading than silence, which people read as expensive and unpredictable.

Publish a range per device level, say what is included, and say plainly what the follow-up appointments and adjustments cost or whether they are included.

Explain the funding position: what is covered by a health plan, what programmes exist for veterans, seniors, or those with limited income, and who to ask.

That page will bring in more first appointments than anything else on the site.

A worked example

A clinic had a video on the home page with no captions, body text at a small default size, and a telephone number as the only contact route.

They captioned the video, published the transcript, increased the base text size, and added a form and a text number beside the telephone number.

Enquiries through the form began arriving within a week, from people who had not telephoned.

Several mentioned in the appointment that they had noticed the captions.

The clinic had been open for eleven years and had never had a written enquiry route.

The whole change took a day.

Write for somebody who has been avoiding this

Which is most of your prospective patients.

The average person waits years between noticing a problem and doing anything about it, usually because of what it means rather than what it costs.

So a page acknowledging that plainly, without cheerfulness, does more than any description of your technology.

Say what the first appointment involves, that it is not uncomfortable, that no decision is required on the day, and that plenty of people leave without needing anything.

That last point is important and reassuring, and clinics rarely say it because it sounds like turning away business.

It is the sentence that gets somebody through the door after four years of putting it off.

Nothing else on the site is doing that job.

Name the professionals and their registration

Since the field has several titles and patients do not distinguish them.

Say who works there, what their qualification is, and what body they are registered with.

Explain briefly what the different titles mean, since somebody comparing clinics has no way to know.

Say whether you are independent or affiliated with a manufacturer, since that affects what you can recommend and patients increasingly ask.

Independence stated plainly is a genuine differentiator in this field.

Do the ordinary accessibility work too

Since the specific items above sit on top of the general ones rather than replacing them.

Form labels that stay visible, a focus indicator you can see, a heading structure that reads in order, and a site that works when enlarged to twice the size.

Your patients skew older, which means age-related vision and dexterity are as relevant on this site as hearing is.

A clinic that captions its videos and has a form nobody can complete with a keyboard has done the visible half and missed the rest.

Run the ordinary checks as well, since for this practice they are part of the same argument rather than a separate obligation.

The counter-case

Referral patterns drive much of this work.

Family physicians, specialists, and word of mouth among an older population produce most appointments, and the site is a confirmation rather than a source.

Publishing device prices is also genuinely difficult where the same device is sold at different levels of included service.

And a clinic within a larger group may not control its own site at all.

Caption every video, publish transcripts, raise the default text size, add a written contact route, and publish a price range.

What to build first

1. Caption every video.
2. Publish the transcripts.
3. Raise the default text size.
4. Add a form and a text number.
5. Say you correspond in writing.
6. Publish a price range.
7. Explain the funding.

Step four is the one that changes who can reach you, since a practice serving people with hearing loss whose only contact route is a telephone call has excluded a share of its own patients.

Where responsibility sits is covered in who is responsible when it is not accessible.

Frequently asked questions

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