Nog Open — Privacy-First "What's Open" PWA
Joe Gullo Digital
About
Nog Open answers one question: Wat is er nog open bij jou in de buurt? — what's still open near you. It covers seven Dutch cities and more than 2,500 places, and runs without accounts, cookies, or tracking.
What language parity actually means
Most bilingual sites I review are English-first with Dutch bolted on. The symptoms are consistent: untranslated error messages, a language switch that drops you back to the homepage instead of the page you were reading, and a lang attribute that never changes — so a screen reader keeps pronouncing Dutch with an English voice.
Nog Open is fully bilingual NL/EN in both directions, including the parts nobody demos: errors, empty states, and the switch preserving your place. This is where I worked out how to do it properly before asking a client to.
Dutch holiday awareness
Opening hours in the Netherlands bend around public holidays, and a naive schedule lookup gets Koningsdag and Tweede Paasdag wrong in ways that matter when you're standing outside a closed door. Handling that correctly is a localisation problem before it's a data problem — and it's the kind of detail that separates a translated interface from a genuinely local one.
Privacy by omission
No accounts, no cookies, no tracking. The app can't leak what it never collects, which keeps its GDPR surface at zero and removes a whole category of consent interface — one that is, in practice, among the most consistently inaccessible things on the European web.
Check it yourself
Open it, switch between NL and EN, and confirm the page holds its place. Turn on a screen reader and check the language announcement changes with it. It's built to WCAG AAA, and it's live — the claim is only worth what you can verify.