Augmenting Tourism Websites With Voice Commands for Increasing Accessibility in Smart Tourism Destinations

Abstract

Accessibility of tourism destination of official websites has been widely considered under the umbrella of Smart Tourism Destinations. Unfortunately, digital accessibility perceived by users is still a challenge since there are a plethora of websites apart from DMOs (Destination Management Organizations). Users with disabilities encounter problems when accessing these websites, especially elderly people with visual problems while browsing and reading the contents of a website, thus making it more difficult to organize a travel. In this article, we propose a Web Augmentation Framework for Accessibility and apply it to a tourism scenario (WAFRA4Tourism) in order to improve the accessibility of other-than-DMO websites at runtime. To this aim, the framework uses Web augmentation techniques that extend the website with voice interaction and new actions useful for a person to be inspired as well as to start organizing a trip: select and read aloud fragments, increase font size, facilitate navigation and show videos. The evaluation of the framework shows its usefulness to ease website access for visually impaired users compared to using screen readers. In this way, perceived digital accessibility of a destination is ameliorated, not only considering DMO’s websites but external websites on the destination.

Keywords

• Web accessibility
• web augmentation
• information websites
• voice interaction
• smart tourism destination
• tourism planning