Evaluating accessibility and usability of airline websites

Abstract

The website has become an important factor in digitization. In recent years the airline industry has moved to online channels to increase customer base and provide timely information and services to the users. Persons with cognitive, mental, physical, sensory impairment also access these websites. To make these websites equally accessible to these disabled people, website designers should include the accessibility options in their design. An accessible website not only increases the participation of the disabled person in the digital environment but also make it more usable to everyone. Web quality parameters like usability and accessibility play an important role in customer attraction and retention. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to evaluate the quality of websites of airlines based in India. The evaluation is done on the basis of accessibility, usability, and readability of the website using online automated tools. Usability of the Indian airline websites is evaluated on various parameters of the website such as page size, page load time, number of broken links on the page. Accessibility evaluation of the website is done by checking the compliance of Indian airline website with web accessibility guideline 2.0 and evaluating the color contrast errors which makes the website inaccessible to cognitively disabled persons. Finally, the mobile-friendliness of websites is evaluated using online tools. The result of the study shows that none of the Indian airline websites satisfies the WCAG 2.0 accessibility guidelines and suffers from serious usability issues.