Does your online booking tool meet the accessibility requirements?

Do you know how much time you spend online? Would you like to take a guess?

Ofcom’s annual Online Nation report revealed that adults in the UK spend an average of 4 hours and 20 minutes online each day, and 75% of this time was on a smartphone [1]. That equates to more than 87 days (or 24 per cent) of your year, every year. It’s become such a normal part of our day-to-day lives, the majority of us don’t even think twice about hopping online to respond to emails, join a Zoom call, read the news, scroll through Instagram, order groceries, buy new clothes or book travel.

But for people with visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, language, learning, and neurological disabilities, using the Internet can be a complicated and frustrating process. We all perceive and interact differently in the online world and people who see, hear, move or think differently deserve the same opportunities to engage with digital content as the rest of society.

According to Scope, there are approximately 16 million disabled people in the UK, including 23% of working age adults [2]. Statistics from RNIB show there are around 2 million people with sight loss that is severe enough to have a significant impact on their daily lives [3]. 3 million people have some form of colour blindness – it affects 1 in 8 adult males and 1 in 200 adult females [4]. 2 million Brits use hearing aids, 1 in 6 suffer from some form of hearing loss and 900,000 are severely deaf [5]. And, according to the NHS, an estimated 1.5 million people in the UK have a learning disability [6].

So, you can see why it’s so important that digital experiences are designed to be accessible and inclusive for everyone who wants and needs to use them. If almost one fifth of the working population has a disability, that’s also a lot of business travellers and travel bookers whose needs may not be currently met online.

At Corporate Travel Management (CTM), our technology philosophy is simple: we are committed to developing highly intuitive and easy-to-use tools for everyone at every step of the travel experience. After becoming the first TMC to secure WCAG 2.1 accreditation in 2020, Corporate Travel Management has now secured WCAG 2.2 accreditation for our Lightning online booking tool and CTM Portal technology suite to AA standard. It’s so important that we design technology that supports all our customers’ travellers equally and achieving WCAG 2.2 AA accreditation is a welcome recognition for the work our technology teams are doing.

What is WCAG?

WCAG – Web Content Accessibility Guidelines – are a recognised set of recommendations for web designers and developers. WCAG AA standard accreditation is given to websites designed to be accessible to people with a wide range of disabilities, including visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, language, learning, and neurological disabilities. It is currently only a legal requirement for public sector organisations.

So, what does that actually mean for Lightning and CTM Portal UK users with an impairment?

Well, it means lots of things and here are just a few of them:

• Allowing keyboard-only navigation so that users who can’t use a mouse can interact with and navigate elements easily
• Ensuring full compatibility with assistive readability technology tools to enhance accessibility and comprehension for people with reading impairments
• Including captions and transcripts for videos to make audible content accessible to people with hearing impairments
• Avoiding auto-replaying media which can create problems for people with motion sensitivities or cognitive disabilities
• Maintaining responsive and flexible design to ensure that content remains readable and usable on all devices
• Regularly updating and maintaining accessibility features to ensure we continue to meet the needs of our customers

 

Sources: * Scope / Scope / RNIB / Colour Blind Awareness / Hearing Link / NHS