Someone complained the site isn't accessible

For a medical practice this arrives with legal weight, and the temptation is to run a checker, fix what it says, and declare the matter closed. That is the one response guaranteed to be wrong, because the checker’s silence is not evidence.

1. Take the specific complaint seriously and separately. If someone said they could not complete a booking, that exact path is the priority and it is worth reproducing before any general audit. A named barrier is worth more than a hundred generic findings.
2. [manual] Route the legal side immediately. A demand letter is not a support ticket. Whoever handles the practice’s legal matters needs it now, and the technical work runs in parallel rather than instead.
3. Run the accessibility check on the pages that matter. Home, the booking or contact path, and the top service pages. It finds contrast failures, missing labels and names, focus problems and the structural faults that block assistive technology.
4. Check the structure and the layout. Heading order and a single H1 from the on-page grade — heading structure is how a screen-reader user navigates a page, and a page with no H1 or six of them is genuinely hard to use. The layout check catches content that overlaps or collapses, and links with no accessible name.
5. Look at it at real sizes. Capture across devices and at increased zoom. Text that reflows off screen at 200% is a failure a desktop check does not see.
6. [manual] Test the booking path by keyboard alone. Tab to every field, complete it, submit it, without touching the mouse. This takes two minutes, it is not automatable, and it finds the barriers that matter most — a form that cannot be completed by keyboard cannot be completed by a screen-reader user.
7. [manual] Fix in order of who is blocked, then re-verify. Something preventing a booking outranks a contrast ratio on a footer link. Re-run the checks and repeat step 6 after the fixes.
8. Report what was tested and what was not. Automated coverage, the manual keyboard pass, and the fact that no assistive-technology user has tested it unless one has. That honesty is the useful record.

Never report a clean scan as compliant

Automated tooling covers a fraction of the applicable criteria. Saying “the site passes accessibility checks” in response to a complaint is both untrue and, in a legal context, worse than saying nothing. Step 8 exists so the report says what was actually done.