EmarationHome › Case studies › Audiology + accessibility e-commerce (illustrative)
Audiology + mobility-accessibility e-commerce · 12-month engagement · Illustrative compositeNorthwest Hearing & Mobility built an accessibility-first funnel that finally wins the customers it serves.
An independent audiology clinic with a growing online store for hearing aids and mobility/DME equipment — missing the exact customers it served because the website wasn't usable to people with low vision, hearing loss, or limited dexterity. Over twelve months Emaration's six-layer audit, a one-time accessibility-and-migration sprint, and Content Ops Tier 2 made the funnel usable, fixed attribution, recovered organic and AI-engine visibility, and surfaced ~5.2× first-year ROI. Composite engagement; the mechanics are real, the outcomes projected from industry benchmarks. This is the Jordan beachhead vertical: accessibility as the product, not an afterthought.
The site was unusable to the people it was built for.
An independent audiology clinic, $2–5M revenue, with an online store for hearing aids, batteries, and mobility/DME equipment that had grown to roughly a third of revenue. The owner is an audiologist; the store was run by one part-time admin and a generalist web freelancer. They'd spent a year on a $2,500/month "growth" retainer and described the result, verbatim, as "more traffic, the same number of orders, and customers calling the front desk because they couldn't finish checkout."
The owner could feel the upside waiting. Customers who needed the products most — older adults, people with low vision, people with limited dexterity, people who are hard of hearing — were the ones abandoning the cart. The contrast was too low to read product specs, the checkout form failed keyboard navigation, the product videos had no captions, and screen readers announced the "add to cart" buttons as unlabeled. Traffic was fine; the conversions were waiting to be won at navigation and checkout. On top of that, AI Overviews were absorbing informational queries like "best hearing aids for severe hearing loss" and "are walkers covered by Medicare," and the clinic was rarely cited. Accessibility wasn't a compliance checkbox here — it was the entire conversion problem.
Baseline at intake (illustrative)
| Metric | At intake | Source |
|---|---|---|
| GSC clicks / month | 5,600 | Google Search Console |
| GSC impressions / month | 320,000 | Google Search Console |
| GA4 sessions / month | 12,400 | GA4 |
| Conversions / month (orders + bookings) | 188 | GA4 + call tracking + store |
| Checkout completion rate | 38% | GA4 funnel |
| Automated WCAG-AA failures (axe) | 340+ | axe-core scan |
| AIO-affected query share | ~34% | Manual SERP analysis |
| Core Web Vitals LCP (p75) | 4.5 s | PageSpeed Insights |
Known data-quality issues found in audit week one: GA4 e-commerce events misfired so ~20% of completed orders weren't recorded, the keyboard-only checkout success rate was effectively 0% (form could not be submitted without a mouse), and product videos had no captions or transcripts.
The six-layer audit, then the scoped fix.
Every Emaration engagement starts the same way: a six-layer audit delivered in 10 business days from intake. The fix list, the priority, and the line-item pricing all come out of what the audit surfaces — not a template. For this business, accessibility moved to the front of the fix list because it was the conversion problem, not a side quest. Here's how that played out for Northwest Hearing & Mobility.
The audit ran ten business days. We crawled the clinic site and the store, ran Core Web Vitals on the templates, traced redirect chains, validated schema, and ran a full WCAG-AA assessment with axe-core plus manual screen-reader and keyboard-only testing on the real purchase path. We ran a multi-prompt probe across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini for the queries customers actually type — "best hearing aids for severe hearing loss," "rollator vs walker," "are hearing aids covered by Medicare" — and logged where the clinic was cited, where a competitor was cited, and where the AI engine made something up.
-
Technical: redirects + speed
A platform migration had left ~600 legacy product URLs un-redirected, scattering link equity. Mobile LCP was 4.5 s, painful on the entry-level devices many customers use. Fix: 301 matrix, redirect-chain consolidation, image and font-loading cleanup.
-
Content vs. competitors
High-intent buying-guide queries had no dedicated content. Built plain-language, large-type buying guides (hearing-aid fit, DME sizing, Medicare coverage) from the audiologist's own patient-education scripts — voice the clinic already used, just indexed and readable.
-
AI engine visibility (AIO)
Informational queries were being absorbed by AI Overviews and the clinic was rarely cited. Restructured FAQ and buying-guide blocks with JSON-LD to recover brand mentions inside AIO responses. Added Product, MedicalBusiness, and LocalBusiness schema.
-
Measurement & attribution
GA4 e-commerce events misfired, hiding ~20% of orders and making the funnel look healthier than it was. Deployed server-side GTM and fixed the purchase events in month 1, then connected GA4 to BigQuery so the owner could see real checkout drop-off by step and by assistive-tech path.
-
Vendor economics
Prior retainer was $2,500/mo for traffic that never converted. We rebuilt the scope as a 14-line plan with line-item prices — the accessibility remediation and analytics run by us, two SEO lines by a vetted white-label partner at cost, the rest in-house with a written checklist.
-
Accessibility & trust (the headline layer)
This is where the conversions were waiting to be won. Full WCAG-AA remediation: keyboard-navigable checkout, labeled controls, AA contrast, captioned product videos with transcripts, visible focus states, and a persistent text-size/contrast control. Human-tested with screen readers and keyboard-only. Any AI-generated imagery kept a visible disclosure mark per Emaration policy.
Where AI did the work, where humans did the work
AI did this
- Brief generation (intent decomposition + content outlines)
- First-pass drafts of buying guides from approved briefs
- First-pass video transcripts (human-corrected before captioning)
- Anomaly detection against baseline metrics in BigQuery
- Bulk Product schema markup generation
Humans did this
- Every published piece reviewed for voice, accuracy, and medical-claims compliance
- WCAG-AA remediation human-tested with screen readers and keyboard-only
- Checkout path hand-rebuilt and QA'd by Andrew plus a vetted sub-contractor
- Caption accuracy verified by a human, not shipped from raw AI output
- Per-deliverable AI disclosure in every monthly report; AI imagery visibly marked
Cadence was light by design: a 30-minute weekly check-in, a shared Looker dashboard the owner could open any time, and a Monday "what changed, what's queued, what's blocked" note. We explicitly did not do paid media (referred out), social (not a winner for this vertical at this stage), or online reputation management (referred to a specialist).
What would move, by how much, over twelve months.
Every figure below is projected from published industry benchmarks for audiology and accessibility-equipment e-commerce and Emaration's audit methodology, not measured from a single real engagement. Numbers are illustrative.
| Metric | At intake | Month 6 | Month 12 | Delta |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GSC clicks / month | 5,600 | 8,200 | 10,400 | +86% |
| GSC impressions / month | 320,000 | 400,000 | 450,000 | +41% |
| GA4 sessions / month | 12,400 | 16,800 | 19,500 | +57% |
| Conversions / month (orders + bookings) | 188 | 372 | 543 | +189% |
| Checkout completion rate | 38% | 58% | 66% | +28 pts |
| Automated WCAG-AA failures (axe) | 340+ | 20 | 0 | −100% |
| AIO-affected query share | ~34% | ~29% | ~25% | −9 pts |
| LCP (p75) | 4.5 s | 2.0 s | 1.7 s | −62% |
Conversions / month — orders + bookings (illustrative)
Projected from baseline (188/mo) to month 12 (543/mo). Illustrative.
Checkout completion rate — before / after
Before vs. month-12 illustrative projection, accessible checkout path. Projection.
Time to first measurable win in this composite: ~2 weeks (keyboard-navigable checkout ships, recorded checkout completion jumps almost immediately once events fire correctly). What was harder than projected: the legacy checkout widget had to be replaced rather than patched to pass keyboard testing, which added a week. What was easier: captioning the existing product video library lifted both accessibility scores and AIO citations faster than the model assumed.
What it would cost. What it would return. What goes to charity.
| Item | Amount |
|---|---|
| Onboarding audit (deliverable yours to keep) | |
| Accessibility & migration sprint (one-time) | $8,000 |
| Content Ops Tier 2 — $5,000/mo over year 1 | $60,000 |
| Year-1 total client investment | $68,000 |
| Projected Year-1 incremental revenue (orders + bookings) | ~$353,000 |
| Projected Year-1 ROI | ~5.2× |
Revenue model: +355 incremental monthly conversions × ~$83 blended average value (mix of store orders and clinic appointment requests; clinic bookings valued conservatively at lead value, not lifetime). Numbers are illustrative until measured.
What Northwest Hearing & Mobility got that the prior agency wasn't delivering.
| Thing | Prior agency | Emaration |
|---|---|---|
| Accessibility of the actual funnel | 340+ WCAG failures, unusable checkout | WCAG-AA, keyboard + screen-reader tested checkout |
| Conversion clarity | "Traffic is up" | Checkout drop-off by step and by assistive-tech path |
| Attribution clarity | ~20% of orders untracked | sGTM deployed; e-commerce events fixed |
| AI disclosure | None ("we use AI tools") | Per-deliverable: what AI did, what humans did; AI imagery marked |
| Vendor cost disclosure | None | Sub-processor list public; vendor cost in monthly report |
| Friction question at QBR | Never asked | Asked verbatim at M3, M6, M9, M12 |
| Charitable receipt | None | Monthly EOCS receipt with named programs funded |
What would change for the team running the clinic.
"My customers can finally finish a purchase without calling the front desk for help. We sell products that help people hear and move, and our website was the one thing in the building that pushed them away. Now it doesn't. And the report tells me what their AI did, what their humans did, and what they spent at the vendor level — that's the kind of honesty I didn't know I could ask for."
— Composite clinic-owner voice, assembled for illustrative use only. Replaced with a verbatim, written, signed real-client quote the moment a real engagement closes.
What this engagement would fund.
Emaration commits 10% of net profit to Emaration's Outreach and Community Support (EOCS) — the charitable arm Jordan leads. Every client engagement carries a per-engagement receipt the client can see and share. This vertical is especially close to EOCS's mission: making access real, not theoretical.
Projected Year-1 EOCS contribution from this composite engagement
~$5,920 — calculated as 10% of net profit attributable to this engagement (Year-1 Emaration COGS ~$8,500 against $68,000 client investment, ~87% gross margin, EOCS share applied to net).
Programs funded (illustrative):
- Hearing Loss Association of Oregon — 8 captioning-device contributions
- One free accessibility audit for a regional independent-living nonprofit
EOCS amounts and named programs in published receipts will be verified from real engagement financials, not modeled. The figures above are illustrative.
What will be in this case study when a real engagement replaces it.
When this composite is retired, the real version will publish: redacted GSC delta screenshots, the real GA4 funnel export, the before/after axe-core accessibility reports, a read-only Looker Studio link, an audit PDF excerpt, the deliverables inventory log, the real signed-and-dated EOCS receipt with named programs funded, and the verbatim, written, signed client quote — with consent per Emaration's case study template.
Retirement criteria: (1) a real audiology/accessibility e-commerce engagement that has run at least 90 days, (2) real baseline + delta metrics including a before/after accessibility audit, (3) written client consent to publish, (4) a real verbatim client quote. Replace this file, do not edit it.
Run the same audit on your business — free when you join the waitlist.
Join the waitlist — free, no card. Onboarding — our automated six-layer audit and setup,
accessibility included — is normally $1,000, and it's waived when you join via the
waitlist. 10 business days from intake, six layers, a scoped plan with real line-item prices.
Everything you pay for is yours to keep — including 30 days of monitoring.