accessibility statement

Accessibility at Anna Avaliani MD

This website exists so that anyone considering treatment can read about it, see the work, and get in touch. That has to be true for every visitor, including those who browse with a screen reader, navigate by keyboard alone, enlarge the text, use captions, or rely on any other assistive technology. We treat accessibility as part of running a medical practice rather than as an afterthought, because the people most likely to need this site are often the people least able to fight with it.

The standard we are working towards is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, version 2.1, Level AA. While building the site we tested it with automated accessibility tools and checked every page for the things those tools can check: text that stays readable against its background, headings in a real order so a screen reader can move through a page, photographs described in words, forms whose fields are labelled and whose errors explain themselves, and a site that can be operated from the keyboard from end to end.

We put that as what we are working towards rather than something we have reached, because it would not be honest to say otherwise. Automated testing reaches only part of the standard. The rest calls for judgement, and for the site to be used by people who rely on assistive technology every day, which is a review we have not yet had done.

One gap we already know about: a number of pages carry video hosted on YouTube, and we have not yet been through them to confirm that every one has captions. Beyond that, standards move, content is added, and something that passed a check can still be awkward to use in practice. Where we fall short we would rather hear about it and fix it than leave it, so please tell us.

If something on this site is difficult to use

Call the practice on 212-673-8888 and say that you are calling about the website. Someone will help you directly, and if what you were trying to do was book a consultation, ask a question, or find information about a treatment, we can do that with you on the phone there and then. You do not have to solve the website problem first.

You can also write to hello@dravaliani.com. Please put the word Accessibility in the subject line so it reaches the right person quickly, and tell us which page you were on and what happened. A description in your own words is more useful to us than technical detail.

When you contact us about accessibility, you are not required to tell us anything about yourself. Specifically, you do not need to give us any of the following, and we will not ask for them.

• Your name, address, or telephone number.
• Anything about your disability or your medical history.
• Which treatments you are interested in.

The practice itself

This statement covers the website. If you have a question about getting into or around the office at 30 East 60th Street, or about anything you need in place for a comfortable visit, please call 212-673-8888 before you come and we will make the arrangements with you.

Parts of the site we do not control

Some things on this site come from other companies. Maps, video, and social media feeds are built and maintained by the providers they come from, and how accessible they are is largely their decision rather than ours. We choose providers with that in mind and we raise problems with them where we find them, but we cannot promise that every part of an embedded map or video will behave the way the rest of the site does.

The same applies to sites we link to. A link from here to somewhere else is not an endorsement of how accessible that site is, and we have no control over it. If a link takes you somewhere you cannot use, tell us and we will look for a better route to the same information, or give you the information directly.

Help built into your own device

Your browser and your operating system already include a great deal of assistance that works on any website, including this one. Text size and zoom, high contrast modes, reduced motion, spoken page reading, and voice control are all built in on current versions of Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android, and are usually found under a settings menu called Accessibility. If you are not sure where to start, the American Foundation for the Blind keeps a plain-language guide to screen readers and other assistive technology at afb.org (opens in a new tab).

Keeping this current

We review the site's accessibility as part of our ordinary work on it, and this statement is updated when what it describes changes. The date at the top of this page is when it last changed.