Accessibility Statement

Developmental Steps is committed to making developmentalsteps.com usable by everyone, including people who use assistive technology such as a screen reader, rely on keyboard-only navigation, or need extra time or reduced motion to read and use a website comfortably. This page explains the standard we hold this site to, what we have done to meet it, what we know is still incomplete, and how to tell us if something does not work for you.

Conformance Target

We aim to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 at Level AA. WCAG 2.1 AA is the technical standard referenced by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Section 504 rule and used as the benchmark in most ADA Title III web accessibility cases, and it is the standard we measured this site against.

Measures We Have Taken

This site was reviewed page by page against WCAG 2.1 AA and updated to address what was found, including:

• A "Skip to content" link, proper landmark regions (header, navigation, main, footer), and a corrected heading structure on every page.
• Visible keyboard focus indicators on every link, button and form field, so a keyboard user can always see where they are on the page.
• A mobile menu that traps focus while open, closes on Escape, and returns focus to the menu button when closed, instead of leaving off-screen links reachable by keyboard.
• Appointment request forms with real field labels, native required fields, and error messages that are announced to screen readers and tied to the field they describe, not conveyed by color alone.
• Accordions (FAQ answers, condition detail pages) that announce their open or closed state to assistive technology.
• Color and text contrast checked against WCAG AA thresholds across the site's light and dark sections, with several low-contrast colors corrected.
• Descriptive alternative text on meaningful images, and decorative images and icons hidden from assistive technology.
• Support for reduced motion: anyone with "reduce motion" set in their operating system sees this site's animations replaced with an instant, fully visible final state, and the site remains fully readable with JavaScript disabled.
• Automated testing with axe-core across every page template, with issues corrected rather than suppressed.

Accessibility is an ongoing commitment, not a one-time project. We review this site again whenever we add a new page or template, and at least once a year even if nothing has changed, so that it keeps meeting this standard as it grows.

Known Limitations

We believe in being specific about what we could not fully fix, rather than claiming a perfect result:

• Embedded YouTube videos. Our training and exercise videos are embedded from YouTube. The video player itself, including its on-screen controls, is built and maintained by Google/YouTube, not by us, and some of its internal elements do not fully meet WCAG 2.1 AA in our own testing. We cannot modify YouTube's player. Every video embed on this site does carry a descriptive title and none autoplay.
• Older blog articles. A number of blog posts were carried over from a prior version of this website. We corrected heading structure and added missing information where we found it, but we did not rewrite the original wording, and a small number of external links in older posts point to sources that may since have moved or been retired.
• The Google Maps and Google Reviews embeds on this site are third-party widgets; we have given each one a descriptive title where the technology allows it, but their internal behavior is controlled by Google.

No Accessibility Overlay

This site does not use an accessibility overlay or widget (the toolbar-style plugins that claim to fix accessibility automatically). Those tools do not reliably fix the kinds of issues described above, and several have been the subject of their own accessibility lawsuits. Instead, the changes described on this page were made directly in the site's code.

Feedback and Contact

If you use assistive technology and find a page, form or feature on this site that does not work the way it should, please tell us. Call Port Chester at (914) 939-6400 or Mt Kisco at (914) 864-0855, or write to us at 388 Westchester Avenue, Suite 1a & 1b, Port Chester, NY 10573. Please include the page address (URL) and a short description of what happened. We aim to respond to accessibility feedback within 5 business days.

Date of Last Review

This statement, and the accessibility review it describes, was last updated on September 10, 2026.