The New Website for the Nasz Dom Association

The “Nasz Dom” (Our Home) Association from Piwniczna-Zdrój has been supporting people with disabilities and their families since 2001. It runs a centre in Kosarzyska, therapy sessions and a rehabilitation equipment rental service.

Their website at stowarzyszenie-naszdom.org should be a model of accessibility. In practice, it was an old WordPress site that was slowly falling apart. I rebuilt it so that the editors didn't have to learn anything new.

First, I looked under the hood

I made a full backup of the old website and started going through it. The deeper I went, the more interesting it became:

• photos from six years (2015-2021) simply disappeared during an old server migration,
• in eight posts, instead of a gallery, there was a piece of code from the removed plugin hanging,
• the rental equipment regulations page and the bank transfer form returned a 404 error,
• every visitor was immediately introduced to Google and Facebook,
• the server was running a version of PHP that had not been patched since 2023.

In short, there was a lot to do.

WordPress stays, but in the background

At the association, content is added by people who have more important tasks than learning a new system. There's also no budget for licenses. That's why I left them with WordPress, which they already know.

The change is that WordPress no longer displays the page to visitors. It serves as a backend. When someone adds a news item, the server builds a ready-made, static page in Astro within a few dozen seconds. It's fast, difficult to hack, and you don't have to update plugins every week.

In addition, the site cleans up after the editor. It corrects headings, removes colored inserts, and adds file format and size for each uploaded file. If an image is missing, it's immediately visible.

A website that can be read (and listened to)

At the very top of the page is a bar where you can:

• increase text size,
• enable high contrast or dark mode,
• play the text-to-speech feature.

The text is set in Atkinson Hyperlegible, a font specifically designed for visually impaired individuals. It fit perfectly here. I made the entire project compliant with WCAG 2.2 AA, and there's also an accessibility declaration on the site.

Reading out loud is my favourite part. The site reads paragraph by paragraph and highlights the section being read. You can pause or stop it at any time.

It uses the built-in voice of the browser, so it doesn't require any external service. You can also handle everything with just a keyboard.

No Peeping Toms

No Google Fonts, no Facebook widgets. The fonts and search engine run on the same server. And if someone uploads a photo straight from their phone, the site will automatically remove the location data from it. No one needs to remember to do this.

The search engine is Pagefind. The index is created alongside the website, so searching works without a database and without sending queries anywhere.

Old links still work

All the posts kept their URLs, so the links shared on Facebook in the past still work as intended. I archived the old site to preserve everything.

After launch: a living website

The site launched on October 9th, 2026. A few days later, the board sent their first list of changes, which was the best test of the entire concept. New texts, photos of the center, reports for 2024 and 2025, and information about donating 1.5% of tax were added to the site without rebuilding the template.

The main page now features the ‘Active differently - I want, I can, I know!’ project, funded by PFRON, with a schedule of activities. The center in Kosarzyska has received a section with photos before and after the expansion.

What is it made of

• Astro, Tailwind CSS and DaisyUI with custom themes: light, dark, and high contrast,
• WordPress as the backend (headless CMS) with a custom plugin that restricts editor blocks and removes EXIF data from images,
• Pagefinder - a search engine that doesn't need a database
• Web Speech API for text-to-speech functionality,
• standard shared hosting with no extra costs.