Disability e-inclusion for accessible tourism websites

Seunghyun “Brian” Park, Ph.D., Undergraduate Program Coordinator / Assistant Professor for Hospitality Management in the Division of Administration and Economics ​​​​in The Lesley H. and William L. Collins College of Professional Studies discusses the current issue of assessing accessibility conditions of travel information and service websites for persons with disabilities. This paper examines the web accessibility of 246 tourism-related websites across countries and service sectors by utilizing the criteria of web content accessibility guidelines. The results show that global airline websites and hotel booking websites have a relatively higher number of known inaccessibility problems. In addition, tourism websites are likely to be inaccessible by omitting text alternatives for any non-text content (guideline1.1), adaptable contents (guideline 1.3) or distinguishable presentation (guideline 1.4). This study concluded that the issue in tourism websites remains unresolved and the investigation needs to continue.

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