Accessibility Statement

• Every public page uses a single h1 + hierarchical headings so screen-reader users can navigate by heading.
• Every interactive element has a visible focus ring; we usefocus-visible:so the rings only appear on keyboard navigation, not on mouse-click.
• prefers-reduced-motion is globally honored (global CSS reset under the prefers-reduced-motion media query): all animations collapse to 0.01ms when your OS setting is enabled. The aurora backgrounds, pulse rings, shimmer text, confetti, and demo waveforms all stop.
• Tap targets on mobile-critical paths (onboard, voice picker, call CTAs) meet the 44px minimum.
• Voice clone consent + record UI isaria-describedby-labeled and clearly explains the biometric-data + ElevenLabs ToS implications before the recording starts.
• Listen-and-verify: every supported language + voice is previewable on /languages — each voice is a keyboard-reachable native <button> that plays a cached sample through one shared audio element, and an aria-live=“polite” region announces which voice is playing to screen readers. (The catalog is 797 voices, so we render one shared player rather than one <audio controls> per voice.)
• Strict CSP + HSTS + Permissions-Policy on every response; site renders without JavaScript for read-only public pages.

We'd rather list the holes than hide them. If something here blocks you, email hello@ringdispatch.com and we'll prioritize the fix.

• BusinessKnowledgeForm(the business-knowledge form in dashboard Settings → Business and the Team editor): service-row inputs (name + price), the Service-area input, and the Other-notes textarea all have explicit aria-label attributes as of 2026-05-23. A small number of helper inputs deep in the team / pricing modals may still be unlabeled — if any field announces as “edit blank” on NVDA, email hello@ringdispatch.com with the field's context and we’ll prioritize that exact element.
• Tour overlay ( TourOverlay.tsx) is a non-modal role=“region” landmark that deliberately does NOT trap or move focus — the tour walks you across the real product surfaces, so trapping focus inside it would break that. For the same reason it does not yet wrap in a proper role=“dialog” / aria-modal=“true” focus-trap. If the tour fires on your first visit and you use a screen reader, you can press Esc — or activate the labeled Close tour button — to dismiss it.
• VoiceRecorder error states no longer rely on color alone: the error row pairs the rose styling with a non-color warning glyph (⚠) and the status region announces “Something went wrong” as text, so the failure is conveyed independently of red-green perception (WCAG 1.4.1). The container is also a role=“alert” live region.
• TTY / 711 / VRS relay calls: there is no relay detection and no relay pacing. A relayed call arrives as an ordinary voice call from the relay operator’s number, so the AI cannot tell it apart from any other call and applies the same silence timing to it. Concretely (silence-posture.ts): the AI waits 7 secondsof silence per turn, then says “Are you still there? I didn't catch that” and keeps listening; after 3consecutive silent windows (~21 seconds) it ends the call. A relay operator’s 5–10 second typing or interpreting delay therefore fits inside one window but will often trip the reprompt. If you serve Deaf and hard-of-hearing customers through relay, tell us — we want the real-world timings, not our guess at them.
• No timed/synchronized captions on the demo audio: the homepage #hear-it player renders the full spoken dialogue as a per-turn text transcript beside the audio (caller and receptionist labeled), so deaf and hard-of-hearing visitors can read every word — but it is a static transcript, not captions time-synced to playback. The same per-turn transcript also renders on every /for/<industry> page. (/call redirects to the homepage #hear-it demo, so the transcript is reachable there too.)

If you, the business owner, are deaf or hard of hearing, RingDispatch is built for you with caveats — most AI-receptionist products assume the owner is hearing. Distinct from a hearing owner with deaf customers (where TTY/711 handling is the issue), this is about whether you can run the business when you can’t hear the phone yourself.

• The AI handles voice calls for you. Your phone never has to ring. Every call is transcribed live on your dashboard so you read what was said the moment the caller hangs up.
• Skip the voice clone. Voice cloning requires you to record yourself reading a script — you can SKIP this step and pick a stock voice from /languages. We're adding textual / spectral voice descriptors (pitch range, formality, perceived gender, energy) so you can pick a voice without listening — until then, sighted hearing partners + screen-reader users describing the audio is the workaround.
• SMS escalation, not phone callback.By default, “press 0 to escalate” pages your phone. If you can't take voice calls, set the “Text alerts” control (Settings → General) to “Every call” or “Emergencies only” so alerts arrive as text + email instead. We're building a co-owner / hearing-partner seat so voice escalations can route to a partner while text-based work routes to you — track on the Roadmap.
• ASL is not supported as a call language.No AI speech model in 2026 speaks ASL or any signed language. Deaf-to-deaf customers calling your business will not get ASL; they’ll get the voice you picked + transcript.
• VRS (Video Relay Service) calls are not detected, and there is no interpreter pacing.When a Deaf caller reaches you through Sorenson, ZVRS, Convo, or Purple, a hearing interpreter speaks on the line and the call arrives at your number looking exactly like any other voice call. We do not detect the relay gateway, there is no per-gateway routing control, and no pacing is tuned for the 5–10 second interpret-and-relay cadence. Our AI is instructed never to tell a caller otherwise (safety.ts rule 21p). What actually helps, today:
  • Press 0 at any point. The keypad is live on every prompt. Zero ends the AI conversation immediately, pages you with a high-priority message, and tells the caller someone will call them right back — no speech timing involved at all, which makes it the most reliable path for a relayed call. Press 9 to have the last thing the AI said repeated, which helps an interpreter who missed part of it.
  • Ask for a message.The caller or the interpreter can simply say they’d rather leave a message; the AI takes the name, number, and request and routes it to you. There is noaccount-wide “take a message instead of booking” switch and no way to apply one to relay calls specifically — this is a per-call request, not a setting.
  • The longer silence posture is automatic, not purchasable. Medical lines, HIPAA-mode accounts, and death-care business types get a 12-second window and tolerate 5 silent windows (~60s) instead of 7 seconds and 3. That is a trauma-informed intake rule, not a relay feature, and you cannot turn it on for relay alone.
  • Every call is transcribed either way, so even a relayed call that ends early leaves you the caller, the number, and what was said.

R16 added this section because R15’s Deaf-OWNER workflow assumed sighted operation, and a Deaf-BLIND owner (Usher Syndrome, progressive vision loss + congenital deafness, or combined late-onset) cannot use the visual dashboard the same way. If you are Deaf-Blind and considering RingDispatch, here is our honest posture:

• Braille refresh + JAWS Windows support is on the high-priority Roadmap. NVDA + VoiceOver are tested today; JAWS is acknowledged as the dominant Windows screen reader used by working-age blind professionals + is being brought into our test matrix (R16 commitment). Refreshable Braille rendering across the dashboard transcript live-region is being verified concurrently.
• Call transcripts by email — shipped, opt-in. Switch on Call transcripts by email(Settings → General) and every call that recorded a transcript emails you the whole thing, word for word, the moment the call ends. The body is plain text — one labeled line per turn (Caller: / Receptionist:), no tables, no layout characters — so a screen reader or a refreshable Braille display reads it straight through. It goes to the owner address only, and it is off until you turn it on. Two limits stated plainly: it is not available in HIPAA mode (we hold no BAA with our email provider, and a word-for-word transcript is the clearest PHI there is — the switch is disabled and the send is refused server-side), and once an email is in your mailbox it is yours, outside our deletion controls, so a later erasure request clears our copy and the dashboard record but cannot reach into your inbox.
• No SMS transcript digest, and we are not building one.An earlier version of this page said SMS transcript digests were available today. They were not, and email is the only supported channel: a transcript does not fit in a text message, and putting a caller’s words in SMS would park them in a channel where we control neither retention nor deletion. Email above is the answer.
• Audio-summary daily digest — NOT built. A text-to-speech recap of the day delivered as audio to a Braille-display-paired tablet or smart-speaker does not exist; it is on the Roadmap. What exists today is the transcript email above and the daily digest email (counts, money booked, and what still needs you) — both plain text, both readable through your own screen reader.
• Tactile-sign support-person delegate access.If you communicate via tactile signing with a support person + use the dashboard ONLY through written email/SMS, the multi-user delegate access feature is your path: invite a support person as a scoped delegate (Dashboard → More → Delegates) and they receive a magic-link, read-only dashboard of their own — no shared login required.
• Audit credit: R16 Henry Chen, Chinese-American deaf-blind import/export consultant.If you are a Deaf-Blind owner considering RingDispatch, email hello@ringdispatch.com — we will walk you through the current posture honestly + tell you whether we're ready for your workflow yet.

R12 Andre (blind massage therapist) + R16 Henry (Chinese- American deaf-blind import/export consultant) covered blind BUSINESS OWNERS + blind END-CALLERS. R22 adds a third workflow: blind professionals operating the dispatch console daily as their primary work tool— blind attorneys (Amir Rahimi-Khan R22, Iranian-American blind solo immigration attorney Falls Church VA), blind paralegals, blind accountants, blind clinicians + therapists, blind tax preparers + bookkeepers + insurance brokers. Their console-use intensity is higher than a typical business owner: dozens of calls + booking-updates + transcript-reviews + client-file management per day, every day.

• NVDA + VoiceOver tested transcript UI, with live-region announcements on SOME surfaces, not all — the honest split, because it decides how you have to work. The live-call drawer and the transcript drawer announce each turn as it lands (aria-live=“polite” on the turn list), and the Today page, booking detail, customers, estimates, settings, and the toast layer announce status changes and alert banners the same way. The Calls list, the Inbox, and the Dispatch board do NOT announce.Dispatch and the Inbox refresh their data on a timer but do so silently; the Calls list does not auto-refresh at all. So a new call arriving, a new needs-action item, and an urgent flag reach you when you re-read the list or reload the page — not by announcement. We would rather you plan around that than be told “real time” and miss something. JAWS testing is on the roadmap (see Standards section below — we do not yet do regular JAWS testing).
• Keyboard-navigable booking management.No mouse required for any common workflow: review call, update booking, send SMS, change voice, configure hours, run report. Skip-links + landmarks throughout. The first-visit TourOverlay is a role="region" landmark with a labeled Close tour button and working Esc-to-dismiss (it does not trap or move focus), but does not yet wrap in a role="dialog" / aria-modal="true" focus-trap — see the honest-gap disclosure above.
• Transcripts arrive by email, if you switch it on.Two emails work today, both plain text: the per-call transcript email (Settings → General →Call transcripts by email, off by default, one email per call, the full turn-by-turn transcript) and the daily digest (yesterday's counts, money booked, and the needs-action queue). Neither is available on a HIPAA tenant in transcript form — HIPAA accounts get the PHI-free versions, and the transcript email is refused outright. An audio-described / text-to-speech digest does not exist.A spoken recap of the day's calls delivered to a smart-speaker or a Braille-display-paired tablet is on the roadmap and nothing ships today; if you need audio, it is your own screen reader reading these emails.
• Braille refresh on transcript live-region.Refreshable Braille display rendering of incoming transcript text + booking-form fields verified concurrently with JAWS testing.
• Interpreter-relay calls: no special handling, and we won't pretend otherwise. A call that comes through Sorenson VRS / ZVRS / Convo / Purple is not detected as a relay call, so nothing about the transcript, its timing, or its live-region announcements differs from any other call — there is no relay pacing and no JAWS-specific rendering. (JAWS itself is still untested; see the Standards section.) The transcript announces as each turn lands, whoever is speaking. The honest disclosure for Deaf callers on your line is in the Deaf + hard-of-hearing section above, and it applies identically when a blind operator is the one receiving the call. Audit credit: Amir Rahimi-Khan R22.

We target WCAG 2.1 Level AA, which is the technical baseline for Section 508 / 36 CFR 1194 conformance. We do NOT yet have a published VPAT (Voluntary Product Accessibility Template) / Accessibility Conformance Report. If your federal procurement requires one (most do for tools sold to or used by federal agencies), email hello@ringdispatch.com and we’ll prepare a VPAT scoped to your contract. Honest disclosure: RingDispatch is NOT FedRAMP-authorized and NOT a federally-track product — see the security page for the full list of federal authorizations we DON'T hold.

Round 7 added SDVOSB + VocRehab + reentry-friendly framing. Round 9 extends the same posture to non-veteran disability: chronic-illness, autoimmune, fluctuating-disability, mental- illness, and dual-diagnosis entrepreneurs. We do not gate account access by disability status. If you've been denied service or treated dismissively by other SaaS providers because of your disability, write to hello@ringdispatch.com and tell us what you need.

Known disability-relevant gaps in the product today:

• Variable-hours / spoonie mode:you CAN close any single day on a flare — Settings → Holidays & closures lets you mark any date (including today) closed, and the AI treats that day as closed. What we don't yet support is a PARTIAL-day / reduced-hours override for a flare (e.g. “open, but only 1–3pm today”); that same-day custom-hours mode is on the roadmap.
• Subscription pause / medical-leave: not yet shipped; cancel-anytime + re-subscribe is the workaround.
• State-Vocational-Rehab counselor funding: same documentation support we offer SDVOSB applies. Tell us your counselor + state agency; we’ll prep the W-9 + invoice format.
• General-disability discount tier:no, not today. The SDVOSB rate is the same as our commercial rate; we have not yet added a disability-specific discount. We are evaluating one alongside the broader pricing-tier redesign — email if it would meaningfully shift your decision.

Resettled refugees, asylum seekers with work authorization, and humanitarian-parole entrants (Afghan parolees, Ukrainian U4U, Cuban-Haitian-Nicaraguan-Venezuelan CHNV) all run small businesses. We don't screen by immigration status. Your SSN or ITIN is accepted at signup; you don't need an EIN. If your refugee resettlement organization (IRC, USCRI, HIAS, World Relief, Catholic Charities, Lutheran Immigration, ACCESS-Dearborn, etc.) is supporting your business launch and needs an invoice / W-9 / vendor-verification letter from RingDispatch LLC (VA), email hello@ringdispatch.com and we’ll prep it within one business day. Common payment-processor KYC friction points (Stripe / Twilio / CDFI bank routing) are documented under Reentry below — same workarounds apply.

~600,000 people are released from US prisons annually; many start businesses through reentry organizations like CEO Works, Center for Employment Opportunities, Defy Ventures, and Hudson Link. We do not screen account holders by criminal history. The age-of-majority and BIPA-related requirements in our /terms apply to everyone, full stop — we don't add a felony exclusion.

Known KYC friction points you may hit: (1) Stripe Connect (for payouts to a connected account, if ever wired) runs its own KYC and can deny based on OFAC-adjacent flags — if you hit a wall, email hello@ringdispatch.com and we'll work with you on alternatives. (2) Twilio A2P 10DLC brand vetting can downscore sole-props with thin business credit. (3) Some CDFI (Community Development Financial Institution) routing numbers occasionally trip Stripe's bank verification — let us know which CDFI you bank with and we'll pre-test.

Sole-proprietorship-under-SSN signup is supported. You do NOT need an EIN to use RingDispatch. The platform routes to generic / free-text business-type when your trade isn't in our preset list — painting, contracting, mobile catering, and other reentry-common trades all work this way.

Stripe deplatforming risk for reentry-owned businesses (R16 honest disclosure).Stripe has historically deplatformed merchants under TOC §8 “high-risk merchant” reviews triggered by background-check signals adjacent to OFAC + AML + general risk-scoring. If your account is restricted or terminated because of background-check flags, your RingDispatch AI keeps working through the end of your paid period — we won't pull the plug because Stripe did. We are exploring alternative processors (Square, bank-direct ACH, and CDFI-friendly options like Hope Credit Union, Native CDFI Network members, Self-Help) and will document specific options for reentry entrepreneurs as they ship. We'd rather you know this BEFORE you sign up than have you discover it after losing your processor.

Year-1 banking + cash-only / Square-only / Cash App reality (R16 honest acknowledgment).Most reentry entrepreneurs operate cash-only or Square-only in year 1 because traditional banks deny applications + Stripe's risk-scoring catches background-check signals. We accept this as the operating reality, not an exception: list your current accepted payment methods in business_notes (“Cash + Square reader + Cash App only, no card-on-file possible yet”) and the AI quotes accurately to callers. We do NOT require Stripe Connect for the receptionist service itself (you pay us monthly, separate from how your clients pay you). Square + Cash App + cash businesses work fine. Audit credit: R16 Latasha Brown, formerly-incarcerated cosmetologist Tacoma WA.

Owner-bio + carceral-history non-disclosure (safety.ts rule 21k R16).The AI is system-prompted to NEVER volunteer or confirm sensitive owner-bio details to ANY caller: BOP / supervised-release / parole / felony record / sealed-record status / addiction-recovery / mental-health history / HIV+ status / immigration status / gender-identity history / abuse-survivor history. Hostile callers asking “I heard the owner was in prison — is that true?” get categorical refusal. The AI affirms ONLY owner-documented credentials (state license + business address + service offerings + hours). Personal bio is OFF-LIMITS unless the owner has explicitly opted-in to public disclosure (e.g., publicly-OUT recovery / reentry coaches whose history IS part of the brand).

Military-spouse entrepreneurship is a major US small-biz demographic (~25% of military spouses run home-based businesses, per DoD data). Frequent PCS-moves and long deployments shape your needs in ways most SaaS doesn't think about. What we support today:

• Cancel-anytime / re-subscribeacross PCS cycles — with one thing you must plan for. Cancelling releases your AI phone number back to the carrier, and a cloned voiceprint is destroyed at the same time (our BIPA destruction promise: we delete biometric data the moment it is no longer needed). What survives is your booking history, your customers, and your business settings including your stock-voice, language, hours, and service configuration — so re-subscribing takes minutes, but you get a newnumber and would have to re-record a clone. If keeping the number across a gap matters, forward a number you own to us (Settings → Phone) instead of using the one we provision, or stay subscribed through the move.
• IANA timezone overridein Settings means a CA-to-ND PCS-move re-anchors your hours config correctly. (We do not yet prompt “keep wall-clock 9-5 local or shift absolute” on timezone change; honest gap.)
• APO/FPO billing addressesare accepted by Stripe; we don't add a US-only restriction.
• No military-spouse discountis offered today. We are evaluating one alongside the SDVOSB pricing we already offer — email us if a MSEP-tracked discount would meaningfully shift your decision.

What we DO support: scoped delegate access. Becca can invite her sister (Dashboard → More → Delegates) and her sister gets her OWN magic-link login — no shared credentials — that can view the schedule and receive emergency pages. The honest gap: that delegate is READ-only today. Her sister can watch bookings and get paged, but can't yet take a booking or change settings on Becca's behalf — a write-capable co-owner is on the roadmap.

We support SDVOSB-designated businesses with the same pricing as anyone else (one tier, no government markup). If your state Vocational Rehabilitation counselor is funding business-tooling and needs a quote, invoice, or W-9 from RingDispatch LLC (VA), email hello@ringdispatch.com with your VocRehab counselor's name + agency. We respond within one business day with the documentation they need to approve your funding.

If something on the site or in the app doesn't work with your assistive technology — screen reader, keyboard navigation, voice control, switch input, refreshable braille, anything — tell us:

• Email hello@ringdispatch.com with subject “Accessibility barrier” and a brief description.
• Include your assistive technology (NVDA 2024.3 on Win 11 Chrome, VoiceOver on iOS, etc.) so we can reproduce.
• We acknowledge within one business day and target a fix or a dated workaround within five.

We test with NVDA on Windows, VoiceOver on macOS + iOS, and keyboard-only navigation in Firefox and Chrome. We do not yet do regular JAWS testing — that's on the list. Quarterly internal a11y audits + persona-driven sub-agent audits (including a totally-blind screen-reader-using business owner simulation) drive our fix backlog.