Web accessibility in the tourism sector: An analysis of the most used websites in Portugal

Abstract

The technologies have received predominant interest in the tourism industry. The increase of technology and wireless connection reduces time and distance limitation which leads to a positive communication and relationship between suppliers and consumers. However, are the web tools properly designed and coded, to be used by people with disabilities? This paper was aimed to present the results of the web accessibility of tourism websites. Each homepage was analyzed in terms of the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) web accessibility. The majority of tourism websites homepages were found to fail one or more of the W3C web accessibility measures which means disabled users may have substantial problems when accessing websites. Several suggestions on how to improve the accessibility of the websites are then offered. This study contributed to the discussion about the use of tourism technologies by people with disabilities.