The mismatch
A denture clinic's patients are frequently over sixty. Many read with their phone's text size turned up, some with a magnifier in the other hand. Their websites, meanwhile, are usually built by people in their twenties and thirties on large bright screens, and signed off on the same screens.
The result is a site that looks calm and modern in the meeting and is close to unusable for the person it was made for. Nobody ever complains about it. They just close the tab and ring somebody, or ask their daughter to look instead, which is why the problem stays invisible for years.
How it shows up in the diary
You can usually see it without measuring anything.
The phone rings with questions the site answers, because the caller could not find the answer on the page. Online bookings, when they come, are made by someone with a different surname from the patient. Enquiries mention things that are on the site already. And the fees page gets traffic while the booking button does not.
None of that proves a readability problem on its own. All of it together, in a clinic whose patients are mostly older, usually does.
The specific things that fail
Small type set in fixed units. If the base size is small and the type is set in pixels rather than relative units, turning up the phone's text size may change very little. The patient does the one thing available to them and nothing happens.
Grey text on white. Low contrast reads as elegant on a designer's monitor and as fog to an eye with a cataract. This is the single most common failure and the cheapest to fix.
Layouts that break when the text grows. The menu button lands on the logo, two columns crush into one another, a button's label spills outside it. The page has not been tested at any setting other than the default.
Buttons too small and too close. An unsteady hand needs a target with room around it. Two links a few pixels apart means mis-taps, and a mis-tap on a phone is where people give up.
Text inside images. A price list saved as a picture cannot be enlarged, cannot be read aloud, and cannot be found in search.
Long pages of dense copy. Even at a good size, a wall of ten-line paragraphs is hard work. Short paragraphs and frequent headings do more for readability than another point of font size.
Words the patient does not use. Prosthesis, edentulous, immediate loading. Write what a patient would say, and put the technical term in brackets after it if you want it there at all.
What a site for these patients does instead
Type large to begin with, so scaling up is a small adjustment rather than a rescue. Strong contrast, dark text on a light ground. Short lines, short paragraphs, headings every few of them.
A navigation that fits in a patient's head: five or six items, named plainly, with fees and repairs among them rather than buried under services.
The phone number in the header on every screen, tappable, and never rendered as an image. Some of your patients are never going to use a form and should not be nudged towards one.
Buttons that look like buttons, with space around them and labels that say what happens next. "Book a consultation" beats "Get started".
Photographs of your own clinic and the people in it, which do a job no font size can: they tell an embarrassed patient that they will be treated gently.
And a page that still holds together when the patient scales it up, because that is the only test that matters.
The test that takes one minute
Take your own phone. Set the system text size to a large setting, not the largest, just clearly larger than default. Open your home page.
Can you read the copy without pinching? Does the menu still open, and can you tell the items apart? Is the phone number still visible and tappable? Does any button have its label spilling out of it? Can you find fees and repairs from that first screen?
If you have a patient in the waiting room who is willing, hand them the phone and watch without helping. Ten seconds of watching will tell you more than any report.
The wider point
Accessibility work in this field is not a compliance exercise bolted on at the end. It is the commercial core of the site, because the audience is defined by it. A denture clinic site that is readable at scaled-up text sizes reaches the patient directly rather than through a relative who may or may not get round to it this week.
It also helps everyone else. Larger type, better contrast and clearer structure make the site faster to use for the family member on a bus and the person searching for a repair one-handed in a hurry.
Where this sits
Readability at real text sizes is a build requirement in every denture clinic website we make, tested on a handset rather than assumed, alongside the price records and the repair page. The same care runs through the wider dental practice websites we build, and what the packages include is on pricing. Design for the eyes that will actually use it.