Travel booking websites is one of the largest online space where people spend their money. Either you have that long vacation to spend some time away from busy office schedule, travel with your kids for a summer holiday or an official trip, first thing anyone do is logging on to a travel booking websites. In India at least half a century websites help you book a flight, bus for the journey or a hotel to stay. Are these travel booking accessibility enabled? Do you think every web user can use these facilities? At least are they able to do basic functionalities such as
- Search for a bus or flight?
- Find if seats are available on a particular date for a particular bus?
- Check fair of a flight travel between two cities?
For my upcoming vacation, couple of weeks back I logged on to few of top Indian travel booking websites. Similar to my surprise I have with The online shopping accessibility experience, travel booking websites are not far behind in providing seamless experience for persons with disabilities. To do a basic check on the home-page I have taken the aXe,
the firefox extension to validate. I checked top 10 online travel booking websites in India to make a choice. Sadly none of them have 0 accessibility violations. Despite of the fact that the interaction with forms on the websites are very critical for the online ticket booking, unfortunately many of the home pages I have validated failed for Forms fields accessibility. This means for more than one instance these websites failed to provide Labels and Instructions to fill in the form fields. Users who use screen readers., users with cognitive disabilities and keyboard only users find it difficult in using the websites if the interaction is inaccessible. Almost all the websites have the color contrast problems. This means the background color of the screen does not have enough contrast with the foreground text color so that people with low vision can easily read the content. Along with these failures almost all the top ten websites have many other accessibility problems that hinder the experience of people with disabilities.
The following information is just to make the online travel booking providers aware of the importance of accessibility and how it impact people with disabilities. To understand about accessibility, understand what is the experience of people with disabilities on your website, detailed information on the website accessibility or any other assistance reach out to me on rakesh@maxability.co.in or drop me a message through our Contact Us page.
Top 10 online Travel booking websites and accessibility violations on home page
| Name of the website | Home page URL | Number of issues |
|---|---|---|
| Red Bus | http://www.redbus.in/ |
23 |
| Clear Trip | http://www.cleartrip.com/ |
46 |
| Make My Trip | http://www.makemytrip.com/ |
93 |
| Yatra | http://www.yatra.com/ |
Axe is unable to find |
| Paytm | http://paytm.com/ |
167 |
| Travelocity | https://www.travelocity.com/ |
21 |
| Travel Guru | http://www.travelguru.com/ |
29 |
| Go Ibibo | http://www.goibibo.com/ |
102 |
| Abhi Bus | http://www.abhibus.com/ |
77 |
| Ticket Goose | http://www.ticketgoose.com/ |
31 |
Maxability wishes to see websites of travel booking accessibility enabled and disable friendly