Top UK airlines' web sites break rules on disabled access

Not one of the nine airline websites audited and checked for accessibility by the national computing and disability charity AbilityNet satisfied the criteria required to facilitate access for users with visual impairment, dyslexia or those with a physical disability making mouse use difficult.

Thus the selected airlines – easyJet, British Airways, Ryanair, Bmi, British European, Monarch, Virgin Atlantic and Mytravelite – are preventing up to 15% of the population from enjoying the benefits of booking their flights on-line and the associated advantages that this offers in terms of price and availability.

It also means that they run the risk of action under the Disability Discrimination Act – which is breached by web sites that are not accessible to the disabled.

EasyJet's site came out as the most accessible of the sites tested but, in common with BA and Monarch Airlines, it could only manage a two-star rating on a five-star scale. The remaining six were given a single star rating and dubbed "very inaccessible" by AbilityNet, with the Virgin Atlantic web site deemed to have "the most serious issues of accessibility of all those tested."

Much of the Virgin site's content and critical functionality, the AbilityNet report notes, is embedded in Flash movies - interactive presentations that make no sense to those who cannot use a mouse, are vision-impaired, or use speech output or voice recognition software, albeit Macromedia, the company behind Flash, does offer an accessible version of the software for use by developers.

To its credit, however, Virgin is the only one of the nine airlines tested to have made a commitment to improving accessibility since being contacted by AbilityNet.

Other drawbacks common to the sites tested include the lack of 'tooltips' that blind people depend on for spoken descriptions of pictures on the screen and too much reliance on Javascript built into pages that cannot be recognised by many older browsers, or 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.

According to AbilityNet, with a potential market of 1.6 million registered blind users as well as a further 3.4 million with disabilities preventing them from using the standard keyboard, screen and mouse set-up with ease, e-businesses are losing out on some £50 - £60 billion per year buying power.

The report is available here