La Finestra Blu

La Finestra Blu came to us with a fully booked house and a website that didn't reflect any of it. The old site was an off-the-shelf hotel-booking template, heavy with carousels, sliders, and animations, none of which worked properly with a screen reader. Many of their guests rely on assistive technology to research and book; the booking journey was the most important part of the site, and it was the part that worked least well.

The brief wasn't to make the site "look more accessible". It was to make the site that someone with a screen reader, a Braille display, or a tremor in their hands could actually use to book a room without help.

• Stripped the site down to a fully static build: no CMS, no plugins, no JavaScript needed for the primary booking journey.
• Re-wrote every page in plain Italian and English, with the kind of specifics accessible travellers need but rarely find: door widths in centimetres, step-free routes, the surface of the garden path, where the nearest accessible bathroom is on each floor.
• Built the booking enquiry form to work entirely without JavaScript, in a single accessible step, with clear error messages.
• Audited the whole site against WCAG 2.2 AA by hand (not just with a checker) and tested it with NVDA and VoiceOver as part of the build.
• Gave the owners a one-page guide for adding new rooms, photos and dates themselves. The site is now content-editable through a tiny git-backed CMS the family understand.

The new site loads in under a second on a 4G connection, scores 100/100 on a Lighthouse accessibility pass, and, more importantly, reads sensibly with a screen reader from top to bottom. The owners report a noticeable rise in direct bookings, and several Google reviews that specifically mention how unusually clear the accessibility information was. We treat the last point as the actual measure of success.

The work didn't reinvent the wheel. It made the wheel actually round.