For many people, the first barrier to hospitality is not at the entrance to a hotel, restaurant or venue. It is encountered much earlier, on a screen. Websites, booking systems and digital information increasingly shape how people discover, access and experience hospitality. When these systems are not designed for everyone, opportunities to welcome guests can be lost before they even arrive.
Design studio Swper has joined Accessible Hospitality Alliance (aha) as its latest Service Partner Member, bringing specialist digital design experience and a distinctly human approach to accessibility.
Founded and led by Matt Pollitt, Swper builds digital products around the needs of the people who use them. Pollitt has worked in digital product design since 2008, with experience spanning Channel 4, NatWest, TD Bank and many other major organisations.
The studio operates differently from conventional design and development teams. Each project is led by a senior designer who takes responsibility for both designing and building the finished product, reducing the risk of important decisions being lost between concept and delivery.
Accessibility is embedded throughout that process, rather than treated as a final compliance exercise.
A recent example is Swper’s work developing the bilingual website for ffeibr, Transport for Wales’ publicly owned fibre network. Launched in July 2026, the website achieved an accessibility score of 100 in Google’s Lighthouse mobile audit. The project also includes a publicly available delivery record detailing its technical performance, governance and implementation.
For Swper, however, automated testing is only part of the picture. Understanding how real people interact with technology, including the barriers they encounter, remains fundamental to accessible design.
Matt Pollitt, Founder of Swper, said: “Too often, accessibility is addressed at the end of a website project, when someone runs a checker over the finished product.
“Those checks have their place, but they only reveal part of the picture. The rest comes from understanding how people actually interact with technology.
“Technology is designed by people, for people. If it doesn’t work for everyone, something important has been missed.
“We’ve joined Accessible Hospitality Alliance because genuine hospitality goes beyond compliance.
“It is about welcoming people, understanding their needs and making them feel that they belong.
“I’m particularly keen to learn from aha’s hospitality operators and people with lived experience of accessibility barriers, to understand where thoughtful digital design can make a meaningful difference.
“I’ll be at the next aha Forum on 11 November, mostly listening.”
Robin Sheppard, Chair and Co-Founder of Accessible Hospitality Alliance, welcomed Swper’s membership: “Hospitality has always been about people, and the digital world is now an integral part of how we welcome them.
“A beautifully designed hotel or restaurant means little to someone who cannot navigate the journey to experience it. Matt understands that good design begins with understanding people, rather than simply satisfying a technical requirement.
“That combination of expertise and curiosity is enormously valuable. Swper joins a growing community committed to making hospitality more accessible, and I look forward to the conversations and collaborations that will follow.”
Swper’s membership adds another dimension to the expertise within aha, connecting digital design with the practical experiences of hospitality operators and the people they welcome.
As technology becomes increasingly integral to hospitality, ensuring everyone can use it is becoming inseparable from the welcome itself.
BT Tower the next venue for The aha Forum, in partnership with Thomas Franks