Case study
La Finestra Blu
A small B&B specifically equipped for guests with disabilities, a tiny, family-run business whose website needed to do quiet, careful work for the people most likely to be considering a stay.
The brief
The family behind La Finestra Blu were taking a long shot. Uprooting everything and moving to the sea so that they could offer a better life to their family, one member of which suffers from a form of autism. Their dream was to open a B&B that could help families in exactly their situation, making accessibility part of the core offer, not just an afterthought.
The brief was to build a brand new site, that didn't require extensive technical knowledge to maintain, didn't require server management, plugin updates or ongoing fixed fees - but above all, the site had to match the same ethos that drove them to change their life entirely and be accessible by design.
What we did
- Worked from first principles to identify and highlight the main values and interest-factors of the property
- Wrote website copy focused on specifics accessible travellers need but rarely find: door widths, where quiet spaces are and the selection of rooms with accessible bathrooms.
- Created a form-less booking strategy, with no tripping points between user and contacting the property.
- Audited the whole site against WCAG 2.2 AA by hand and tested it with NVDA as part of the build.
- Removed all tracking cookies and non-essential scripts allowing site to be visited in privacy and ensure lighting-fast loads even on poor networks
Outcome
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 happy they were with the accessibility information provided. We treat the last point as the actual measure of success.
The work didn't reinvent the wheel. It made the wheel actually round.