Editorial: Journal of Accessibility and Design for all (JACCES)
Author/s: Celeste Eusébio, André Silveiro, Leonor Teixeira
Year of publication: 2020
Subject: Technology, Tourism
Support: Digital
Summary:
Tour operators play an important role in the tourism system, providing information and intermediating the purchase of tourism products. The relevance of these actors is greater for the accessible tourism market, due to the various environmental, attitudinal and informational limitations that people with disabilities face when making a tourist trip. To overcome some of the information limitations, communication channels, such as websites, used by tour operators, must be accessible to all people, regardless of their psychological and physical abilities. To achieve this objective, this study examined the website accessibility of tour operators located in the Central Region of Portugal. Based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, a sample of 182 websites was analyzed, considering the three levels of compliance of the WCAG (A, AA and AAA) and using two automatic evaluation tools (AccessMonitor and “Web Accessibility Test” (TAW). The results show that tour operators’ websites reveal several problems in relation to accessibility, particularly in the basic accessibility requirements (WCAG level A). Furthermore, several problems were identified, mainly in the discernible and robust principles. The article ends with some guidelines to increase the level of web accessibility for tour operators.
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