Accessibility Statement

The standard we aim for

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, Level AA. We consider Rate My Vet partially conformant: it meets the parts we can verify, and the exceptions below are the parts we know it does not, or cannot yet demonstrate.

“Partially conformant” is a deliberate claim rather than a hedge. No independent accessibility audit has been carried out, so a claim of full conformance would rest on our own testing alone.

How it is checked

Two passes, both of which have to succeed before a change ships.

Automated, on every build

Each key page is rendered in a real browser and scanned with axe-core, restricted to the rules that map to WCAG 2.1 Level A and AA. Any violation fails the build — not only the ones the tool rates as severe. The pages covered are the home page, search, a clinic profile, a veterinarian profile, sign-in, registration, password reset, the contact page, the business dashboard signed in and signed out, the error page, and every page under /legal/, including this one.

Automated testing finds roughly a third of accessibility problems. It cannot tell whether a heading structure makes sense, whether a label describes what a control does, or whether an error message is useful. So it is the floor, not the test.

By hand, on every release

Before each release someone works through the core journeys — search for a vet, read a profile, write a review, sign in, correct a listing — using only a keyboard, then again with a screen reader, then at 200% zoom and with reduced motion enabled. The results are recorded against the release. Anything that blocks a journey stops the release.

What we know is not right yet

Listing these is the point of the page. If you hit something that is not here, we do not know about it — please tell us.

• The map on the search page. The interactive map is a third-party component and its markers are not keyboard-operable. Every result of your search is also in the results list beside the map, with the same name, address, rating and link, so no search result is reachable only through the map. We treat the list as the accessible path and the map as an addition to it. The map also shows smaller dots for other clinics that happen to be in view but are not results of your search, and those are not in the list — they are not keyboard-reachable, and the way to reach one is to search that area. A dot's colour and shape say whether the clinic is staffed around the clock; that is also written in words on each clinic's own page.
• Photos posted by other people. A photo attached to a review is described by the caption its author wrote. When there is no caption, the image is marked as decorative and a screen reader skips it — which is right when the photo adds nothing and wrong when it does. We do not have a way to generate an honest description of somebody else’s photograph, and we would rather skip an image than invent what is in it.
• Screen readers we have not tested. Manual testing covers a limited set of screen reader and browser combinations. Behaviour elsewhere should be equivalent, but we have not verified it.
• No third-party audit. Everything above is our own testing of our own work.

Tell us about a barrier

If any part of this site stopped you doing something, write to support@ratemyveterinarian.com or use the contact form. Tell us the page, what you were trying to do, and what you were using — browser, screen reader, phone or computer — if you can. A report with none of that detail is still worth sending; we will ask.

We aim to acknowledge accessibility reports within five working days. A report that blocks someone from a core journey is treated as a defect, not a suggestion.

If the site will not work for you

If you cannot complete something here — correcting a listing that is wrong about you, requesting removal of a review, deleting your account — we will do it for you. Write to support@ratemyveterinarian.com and say what you need. You do not have to explain why, and you will not be asked to prove a disability.

What this statement covers

The Rate My Vet website and everything served from it. It does not cover content on other sites we link to, including veterinary practices’ own websites, which we do not control.

This statement was prepared on September 29, 2026 on the basis of the automated and manual testing described above. It is reviewed whenever that testing changes what we can claim.