Preliminary Results from the American Foundation for the Blind Travel Websites Survey
"The site was awful to use… It took a bloody booking agent to finally make all of the arrangements! It was a confusing mess!"
Everyone wants to get a good deal on travel by reviewing options and then moving on because travel is stressful enough without the added pressures of booking and planning. However, as the quote above demonstrates, many travelers who are blind or visually impaired feel this added stress and confusion when attempting to use travel websites.
The following report summarizes some of the key preliminary results from the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) Travel Website Survey conducted through AccessWorld and the Direct Connect mailing lists.
The Trouble with Travel Website Accessibility
The research examining website accessibility is, unfortunately, limited (Leuthold et al., 2008). Recent Web accessibility research finds four areas where users who are blind or visually impaired encounter accessibility and usability problems: skipping questions, answering multiple option questions, ambiguity with short answer questions, and loss of assessment answers.
AFB found these same problems in the results of the travel website accessibility survey. Sudden changes to webpage layout caused users who are blind or visually impaired to miss entering data into key fields. Users had difficulty selecting dates of travel or destination locations from multiple option interfaces and lost entered data when selecting a link on a webpage or changing the layout of the webpage for better accessibility.
These problems appear to be systemic to travel website design, consistently occurring across different websites. While previous researchers did not suggest any solutions to these problems, it's our hope that more research and activism surrounding these issues will result in tangible solutions and active changes in website design.
Survey Results and Analysis
The AFB Travel Survey ran from December 2011 through May 2012, and there were a total of 111 completed survey responses. The survey was a combination of yes/no and multiple choice questions regarding accessibility tools, frequency of travel website use, preferred access methods, and open-ended questions that allowed for more detail about respondents' experiences with travel websites. Also, by asking respondents to describe what websites they use and what concerns they have, researchers were able to gather richer results than if they had assumed a range of possible answers for users to choose from.
The remainder of this article provides a review of answers to the yes/no and multiple choice questions in the survey, along with some of the preliminary findings from the open-ended questions.
Characteristics of Those Surveyed
Of those individuals who responded to the survey, 74 percent identified themselves as being either blind or visually impaired while 16 percent claimed to work with someone who is blind or visually impaired. Ten percent stated having a friend or relative with a visual impairment. When asked about the frequency of their usage of online travel services (or the usage of a friend, student, or client with a visual impairment), the majority (40.5 percent) claimed to use them occasionally at about two to ten times per year. Fifteen percent claimed regular usage of at least a couple of times each month, 19 percent claimed using them more than 10 times per year, and 16.2 percent claimed rare use of no more than one to two times a year. Nine percent of respondents claimed to never use online sites.
Types of Travel Websites Used
Respondents indicated that 67 percent use travel aggregator websites, such as Travelocity or Kayak, which allow for easy comparison by providing information from different travel search engines in one place. Airline website usage was indicated by 66 percent of respondents, followed by hotel websites at 60 percent. Less popular websites indicated were commuter, regional, and nationwide rail services with 47 percent reported usage and commuter, regional, and nationwide bus travel sites at 39 percent. Cruise or ferry travel websites had the least amount of traffic at 28 percent of reported usage.
Accessibility Considerations
Sixty-three percent of respondents stated that their preferred access to these websites was with their computer. Only two percent preferred using their mobile device, while 23 percent preferred to use both their computer and mobile device. Twelve percent of respondents stated that they preferred to ask for assistance.
When asked about using accessibility tools, 10 percent of respondents claimed to use none of the possible options listed while 22 percent said that their preferred tools depended on the site being used. The majority of respondents (53 percent) stated that they prefer to use a screen reader followed in popularity by preferring to ask another person for help (32 percent). Twenty-three percent reported using color, contrast, and font adjustment on their device. Screen magnifiers were at 19 percent reported usage, and 15 percent reported using a screen magnifier in combination with speech or braille.
When asked if they would use phone booking if it was offered by the provider, 71 percent reported that they would.
Preliminary Findings
Researchers created 21 categorical themes based on these survey responses. The following three categories reflect the top three preliminary findings from the survey's open-ended questions section.
Customer Services
Researchers found that website respondents frequently mentioned problems related to customer service, specifically the use of customer service hotline numbers. The quotation cited at the beginning of this article is representative of these frustrations. Some online travel websites claim to offer users who are blind or visually impaired the option to book with a phone agent while retaining the pricing and discount options found on the website. These users' concerns, however, appear to spring not from the necessity of using the phone booking agent, but from inadequately trained customer service operators that have little or no apparent training on how to assist users who are blind or visually impaired. For example, one respondent mentioned that, even though he repeatedly explained to the agent that he was blind, the agent continued to try to help him navigate the website by asking him to look at specific visual elements on the screen.
Visual Clutter
Respondents also had significant problems related to multiple pop-up boxes, an overabundance of online advertising, and frequent changes to site designs. In addition to the inherent problems related to the visual aspects and screen reader functionality issues caused by the above items, visual clutter also added to the time it took users to complete their reservations. Several users stated that they had to abandon their search because they did not have the time to complete the reservation online.
Calendar Use
Currently, calendars are almost exclusively used to choose dates of travel and destinations on travel websites. The ability to select when you would like to travel and where you plan on traveling is a fundamental part of online booking. Researchers found that, when users described a technical problem with the calendar in their survey response, it was often paired with a customer service issue. This leads to the belief that, when users who are blind or visually impaired are having calendar use problems, they call the website phone number to complete their reservation and then must face the customer service issues described above. This perpetuates a loop of frustration, often causing users to give up entirely or ask for the assistance of a sighted person in order to complete their reservation.
Conclusions and Future Directions
AFB researchers are incredibly excited about this first round of survey results and want to thank all of the AccessWorld readers who responded to the survey as they provided a wealth of information that will hopefully prove useful in improving website accessibility in the future. In addition to moving forward with the survey analysis, researchers hope to conduct website accessibility studies on some of the most popular travel websites and also want to focus on customer relations problems during phone booking. While 71 percent of respondents stated that they would like to have the phone booking option made available to them, this option will do users who are blind or visually impaired very little good unless customer service agents are properly trained to understand their customers' needs.
As this work continues, AFB may need to reach out to companies to advise them not only on their website accessibility issues but on their customer service problems as well. AFB may also be able to help these companies develop specialized training modules for customer service agents and recommend that some agents receive specialized training in disability accessibility with one specialty agent always available during operating hours. Researchers will also be reaching out to you. Starting now, make sure to make your concerns and problems known to the companies you use for travel. Make calls, write letters, and find ways to help educate agents on the types of problems you encounter, and encourage them to share these insights with their supervisors. The results might just be a better booking experience in the future.
References
Babu, R., R. Singh, and J. Ganesh (2010) "Understanding Blind Users' Web Accessibility and Usability Problems," AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction, (2) 3, pp. 73–94.
Leuthold, S., J. A. Bargas-Avila, and K. Opwis (2008) "Beyond Web Content Accessibility Guidelines: Design of Enhanced Text User Interfaces for Blind Internet Users," International Journal of Human-Computer Studies (66) 4, pp. 257–270.
