Excerpt from PhocusWire
Travel websites are among the worst offenders when it comes to accessibility, a new report finds.
Audioeye’s first ever Digital Accessibility Index revealed recurring issues across travel websites, including seemingly simple fixes such as hotel photos missing alternative description.
The study's expert testers, a group made up of people with varying disabilities, uncovered several consistent barriers that hampered the hotel and airline booking experience.
Pop-up windows with no information for visually impaired users and a lack of detailed descriptions for hotel rooms and other areas of a property were also common failings.
In addition, website signage and navigation issues, such as links without labels, meant testers had to try to find out from the surrounding text where a link might take them.
Overall, the study found that 73% of travel pages had at least one image with missing or inadequate alternative text, while 40% of pages with a form had at least one field that was not labeled.
“AudioEye’s Digital Accessibility Index underscores the unacceptable reality that digital experiences are broken for people with disabilities, preventing them from accomplishing key tasks that many of us regularly depend on, such as online shopping, banking, news access, job-related activities and more,” said David Moradi, CEO of AudioEye.
AudioEye's findings are not dissimilar to an annual report run by WebAIM, which analyzed the home pages of the top million websites in February.
It found an average of 50 errors per page across all industries with more than 96% of website home pages failing Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2 (WCAG).
Travel industry home pages studied as part of the WebAIM report scored even worse than the average with 55 errors detected.
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