Disabled Users cannot Book Air Tickets Online, claims Report

UK airlines are preventing millions of disabled people from booking flights online - and potentially losing big business - through poor website access, according to the first of a series of surveys of different industries.
None of the nine airlines examined by charity AbilityNet, which has the British Computer Society as a trustee, met standards for easy access for users with visual impairments, dyslexia or a physical disability making it hard to use a mouse.

The sites, including those of British Airways, EasyJet, Ryanair and Virgin Atlantic, were checked for accessibility using manual and automated methods based on standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium, the automated Bobby system, and others.

Even the top scoring sites - Air 2000, British Airways, EasyJet and Monarch Airlines - only managed a two-star rating on a five-star scale. The others got just one star and were rated 'very inaccessible'.

The Virgin Atlantic website was described as having 'the most serious issues of accessibility of all those tested'.

'Much of the Virgin site's content and critical functionality is embedded in interactive presentations, or Flash movies, so visitors who cannot use a mouse, are vision impaired, or use speech output or voice recognition software will not be able to use the site at all,' the AbilityNet State of the e-Nation report said.

'Other drawbacks common to the sites tested include the lack of spoken descriptions of pictures on the screen and the reliance on Javascript programs that are built into a page but not recognised by many older browsers or by some special browsers used by those with vision impairment. The EasyJet site, for instance, relies on Javascript for the essential task of booking a ticket.'

AbilityNet chief executive Shuna Kennedy said airlines were missing out on a potential market of 1.6m registered blind people alone.

And she warned, 'Internet access to goods and services for disabled people isn't only a commercial and moral duty of care: from October 2004, when extensions to the Disability Discrimination Act come into force, websites will have to be accessible as a matter of law.'

Virgin Atlantic welcomed the research, saying, 'We recognise that we are currently letting down our disabled customers in this area. Our website accounts for less than 10% of our bookings but we had nevertheless already recognised the need to improve its accessibility. We have set up a programme of changes to make the website more accessible.'

The AbilityNet survey is the first of a planned series aimed at drawing attention to the issue of accessibility and to help disabled people find the best websites for their needs. AbilityNet plans to look at online newspapers, supermarkets and banking services.

Further details, including the full reports on all nine airlines, are available on the website below.

AbilityNet is a national charity which advises on IT to support disabled people, through 11 regional centres. Its trustees include the BCS, IBM and Birmingham University. It is at http://www.abilitynet.org.uk.

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