Accessibility Statement

Our Commitment

Smiles of Cary wants everyone to be able to find a dentist, read about their treatment and get in touch with us — including people who use a screen reader, navigate by keyboard, magnify the screen, or rely on captions or high contrast.

Accessibility is not a project we finish. This website is reviewed and improved as it changes, and this statement is written to be checked against, not simply to reassure.

What We Have Done

Measures taken on this website include:

• Measured colour contrast. Text and background pairings across the site were measured against the WCAG 2.1 contrast thresholds rather than judged by eye, and colours that failed were replaced. Body text and small accent text sit at or above the 4.5:1 ratio required for normal text.
• Meaningful heading structure. Pages use one main heading and a nested outline of section headings, so a screen reader user can move through a page by its structure instead of reading it end to end.
• Alternative text for images. Photographs that carry meaning have descriptive alternative text; decorative graphics are hidden from assistive technology so they do not clutter the reading order.
• Keyboard access and visible focus. Interactive elements can be reached and operated with a keyboard, and a visible focus indicator shows where you are.
• Labelled form fields. Fields in our contact form are paired with their labels so that a screen reader announces what each one is for.
• Labelled frames and links. Embedded content such as our map carries a descriptive title, and links are written to make sense out of context.
• Responsive, resizable layouts. Pages reflow for small screens and remain usable when text is enlarged.
• Colour is not the only signal. Links in running text are underlined as well as coloured, so meaning does not depend on colour perception.

Conformance Status

Our target is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 at Level AA, published by the World Wide Web Consortium. These guidelines are the recognised standard for making web content accessible, and they are the standard most commonly referenced in the United States.

[PRACTICE TO SUPPLY: confirm whether a formal third-party accessibility audit or a VPAT / Accessibility Conformance Report has been commissioned. No audit has been performed as part of this website build, and the conformance statement above must not be strengthened until one has.]

Known Limitations

We would rather tell you about these than have you discover them. Where a limitation exists, an alternative way to reach us is always available by telephone.

Content Supplied by Other Companies

Parts of this site are provided by third parties whose code we do not control: the map on our contact page, the widget that displays our public reviews, and the contact form itself. Their markup can change without notice, and known defects in it can only be worked around from our side, not fixed at source. We monitor them and apply corrections where we can.

Our Contact Form

Our contact form is an embedded product. Its fields have been paired with their labels so they are announced correctly, and its colours, focus indicator and button have been re-styled to meet the contrast thresholds. Its status messages — the confirmation or error shown after you submit — are coloured by the product itself and cannot be re-coloured by us; they are set at a large, bold size so that they remain readable. If the form does not work for you, please telephone the office instead and we will take your details that way.

Pages Still Being Reworked

This website was recently rebuilt. Some pages still carry markup from the previous site and have not yet been reworked to the standard described above; their headings, link text and image descriptions may be weaker than on the pages we have rewritten. That work is in progress.

Documents and Media

[PRACTICE TO SUPPLY: confirm whether the practice publishes patient forms as PDFs and whether those PDFs are tagged and accessible, and whether any video on the site requires captions or a transcript. Accessible alternatives should be named here rather than assumed.]

Accessibility at the Office

If you need an accommodation for your visit — assistance with the entrance or the treatment room, a sign language interpreter, large-print or read-aloud paperwork, extra time, or a companion with you throughout — please tell us when you book so we can arrange it in advance.

[PRACTICE TO SUPPLY: the physical accessibility features of the office (accessible parking, step-free entrance, doorway and operatory clearances, accessible restroom) and the notice period the practice needs to arrange an interpreter. These are facts about the building and cannot be drafted from a website.]

Tell Us About a Problem

If you meet a barrier on this site, we want to hear about it — it is the fastest way for us to fix it. Please tell us the page you were on, what you were trying to do, and what happened. If you know what you are browsing with (your browser, and any screen reader or other assistive technology), that helps us reproduce it.

[PRACTICE TO SUPPLY: a monitored non-telephone route for accessibility feedback — an email address, a text number or a web form. A statement offering only a phone line excludes the people most likely to need it.]

[PRACTICE TO SUPPLY: the practice’s commitment for acknowledging and responding to accessibility feedback — no timeline is stated here because none may be invented.]

Formal Complaints

If you contact us about an accessibility barrier and are not satisfied with our response, you may escalate the matter. Please raise it with us first if you can — most problems are quicker to fix than to complain about.

[PRACTICE TO SUPPLY: counsel to confirm which escalation route should be named here — for example the U.S. Department of Justice under the Americans with Disabilities Act, or the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights under Section 1557 where applicable — and whether the practice is a covered entity for Section 1557 purposes. No regulator, address or complaint deadline is named above because that determination has not been made.]

Complaints about the privacy of your health information follow a different route, set out in our Notice of Privacy Practices.

Technical Information

Accessibility on this site depends on the following technologies working in your browser:

• HTML
• CSS
• JavaScript
• WAI-ARIA

These are relied upon for conformance with the guidelines. The site is built to work with current versions of the major browsers, used with or without assistive technology, and to remain readable when JavaScript is unavailable, although some embedded features will not load in that case.

How We Assessed This Site

This statement is based on a self-evaluation carried out during the site’s development, not on a formal third-party audit. The evaluation covered:

1. Measuring every text and background colour pairing against the WCAG contrast thresholds, and recording the measured ratio beside the rule that uses it, so the claim can be re-checked rather than taken on trust.
2. Reviewing the heading outline of each page for a single main heading and a properly nested structure.
3. Reviewing images for meaningful alternative text and hiding decorative graphics from assistive technology.
4. Checking that form fields are programmatically associated with their labels and that embedded frames are titled.
5. Checking keyboard reachability and the visibility of the focus indicator on interactive elements.

We review accessibility whenever the site changes materially, and we act on the reports people send us.

[PRACTICE TO SUPPLY: how often the practice commits to reviewing accessibility, and who is responsible for it, so this statement names an owner rather than the practice in general.]