Accessible healthcare frontends: Gruppo San Donato
Frontend developer at Gruppo Ospedaliero San Donato (2020–2022), one of Italy's largest private hospital groups: patient-facing tools built accessibility-first, through the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Role
- Frontend Developer
- Stack
- JavaScript, React, accessibility tooling (WCAG, screen readers)
- Year
- 2022
Context
Gruppo Ospedaliero San Donato is one of Italy's largest private hospital groups. From June 2020 to March 2022, through the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Lombardy, I built and maintained the patient-facing web frontends through which people found doctors, services, and information.
Problem
A hospital group's users are, by definition, everyone: elderly patients on old browsers, visually impaired users on screen readers, people booking care under stress on bad mobile connections. Interfaces that merely work for the median user fail exactly the people a healthcare site exists for.
What I built
Patient-facing tools and site features, working with design and backend teams to turn wireframes into production interfaces. The distinguishing constraint was accessibility as a hard requirement, not a nice-to-have: semantic markup and screen-reader support for visually impaired users, keyboard navigation, and cross-browser compatibility down to the legacy browsers real patients use.
Impact
This is where my "accessibility as a default" practice was formed, the same discipline I later applied to open-source and Ethereum Foundation work. Healthcare code is proprietary, so unlike my web3 work there are no public commits; the role is verifiable through references.
works