What is hard, said plainly

The walks themselves

Each tour page carries this in full, alongside what is underfoot. In short:

Valletta

Not step-free, and we would rather say so than promise otherwise. The central spine — City Gate, Republic Street, the squares, Upper Barrakka — is level and paved, and can be done on wheels. Strait Street steps down the ridge, and the descent to Lower Barrakka involves steps whichever way you take it. Both can be skipped without losing the thread of the walk. The written guide is plain text and works with a screen reader; the audio needs no reading at all.

Mdina

Mdina is small and level and much of this walk can be done on wheels, which is unusual for a walled town. The Greeks Gate and parts of the bastions have steps and cannot. St Paul’s Catacombs are underground and are not accessible; the stop above ground still works without going down.

The Three Cities

Honestly, this one is hard on wheels. The climbs out of both marinas are steep, and several of the lanes in the Collachio are stepped. The waterfront stops at either end are level and easy; the middle of the walk is not.

Victoria & the Citadella

The town half of the walk is level. The climb to the Citadella gate is steep, and the streets inside it are uneven — passable on wheels with effort and help, in places not at all. The ramparts walk has steps. The stops in the town and at the gate stand on their own if the citadel itself is too much.

Every stop is written and narrated from the street, so nothing is lost by skipping the interiors. Where a stop cannot be reached, the written guide and the audio for it still work from wherever you are — including at home.

The site

• Every page is ordinary HTML text, in reading order, and works with a screen reader. The written guide to every stop is free, so nothing behind the paywall is the only copy of anything.
• The controls are ordinary buttons and links, so they can be reached and operated from a keyboard — the player, the route diagram’s numbered stops and the live transcript included. A skip link takes you past the navigation.
• Colour is never the only signal — the active tab, a finished stop and a free stop are all marked by more than their colour.
• Text scales with your browser’s font size instead of overflowing. The navigation, which is the part most likely to break, is checked across a range of screen widths and text sizes rather than only at the default.
• If your system asks for reduced motion, animations and transitions are switched off.
• The tour, stop, pricing, FAQ and restore pages are checked with an automated auditor (axe) before release, and kept at zero violations rather than at an acceptable number. That check is run by hand at the moment, not by a robot on every commit.

What is not solved

• The narration has no separate downloadable transcript. The written guide covers the same places and the same history, but it is written to be read rather than being word-for-word what the voice says.
• The moving map is a visual thing. The stop list, the written directions and the audio are the non-visual route through the same walk, and the guided mode is optional.
• Automated checks find a fraction of real problems. Nobody has yet sat down with a screen reader and a Maltese street to test this properly.

Tell us what is wrong

If something here does not work for you, that is a fault worth hearing about, and it gets fixed in the next build rather than added to a roadmap.