Assessing Usability and Accessibility of Indian Tourism Websites for Visually Impaired

Abstract

The tourism industry cannot ignore the needs of people with special needs. Providing accessible tourism is essential because of social and legal obligations, but also because they have large business opportunities. These people with special needs face challenges in every social, economic, and digital environment. One of the greatest barriers they face is the lack of accessible and usable information on the Internet, which thwarts their travel plans. This research is aimed at identifying the usability and accessibility status of official state tourism websites of India. The usability evaluation was done on various web quality parameters using automated online tools. The accessibility evaluation was done to check the compliance of Web Content Accessibility Guideline version 2.0 by the tourism website using the automated tool TAW. Further manual inspection was applied to identify accessibility and language options on the webpage. The result revealed that Indian state tourism websites had low usability and accessibility status, and they need much improvement to make them accessible to people with special needs.