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A Travel Booking Audit Covers Every Leg and Every Seat
For the airline, online travel agency, or tour operator that wants a traveler using a screen reader to build the trip, pick the seat, and check in before any countdown runs out.
What We Keep Finding
Booking a trip is the longest form on the web and it runs against a clock. A multi-leg search returns a fare grid a screen reader reads cell by cell while a hold timer counts down. Then comes the seat map, rows of small squares that mean everything to the eye and nothing to the ear. A seat's whole meaning is its position, which is a harder problem than color, because you cannot fix position by changing a color.
Timers are where this industry has a real argument, and it is worth knowing you have it. The timing rule gives a user three ways out. Turn the limit off, adjust it to at least ten times the default, or get warned with at least 20 seconds and the option to extend at least ten times. It then names three exceptions, and one of them fits you. A limit that is part of a real-time event is excepted, and the rule's own example of a real-time event is an auction. An on-sale is close kin. So is the argument that extending a seat hold would invalidate the activity, because the seat you are holding is a seat another traveler is trying to buy. That makes a hold timer arguable rather than a straight failure, and the argument is only worth anything if somebody has written down which of your timers it covers.
US airlines answer to a second rulebook as well, and it is more useful to you than it sounds. The Air Carrier Access Act puts the Department of Transportation in charge, and it requires a carrier's primary website to meet WCAG 2.0 Level AA, with the core booking pages due by December 12, 2015 and the rest of the site by December 12, 2016. The part nobody quotes is the sentence after it. The regulation requires that the site be tested in consultation with people with disabilities who actually use carrier websites. A federal regulator wrote user testing into the rule, which is the same thing we do on every audit. The underlying failures are the same WCAG failures we test everywhere else, so one fix list serves both.
What We Check
- Build a multi-leg trip end to end with a screen reader, search to seat
- Test every hold timer against the three routes the timing rule allows
- Pick a seat by keyboard, with position, availability, and price all spoken
- Run online check-in by ear, so passenger details, bags, and boarding pass
- Check fare grids read as tables, with legs, times, and prices comparable
What You Get
Every service on this site runs the same three-pass engine: an automated scan, an expert review of all 55 WCAG 2.2 A and AA rules, and a hands-on session with a professional blind screen-reader user. You get one report with every finding screenshotted, ranked by user impact, and linked to its fix. Your team fixes, we verify: the re-audit is half price within 3 months.
The format is not a mystery either. Read the sample report before you spend anything.
The Honest Limit
One honest limit. Our testing is desktop-based, so a native airline app is outside what we look at. We cover mobile web check-in through the responsive checks, and where a journey only exists inside your app we say so rather than let a web finding stand in for it. That matters more in travel than almost anywhere else, because this is an industry whose customers are mostly on a phone at the moment they need the site to work.
What It Costs
Rapid Audit: $499, up to 10 pages you pick, report in 5 business days. Standard Audit: $1,499, up to 25 pages in 10 business days. Flat rates, no discovery calls, and a real blind screen-reader user on every engagement. Pick your pages. We bring the humans.
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Guides, checklists, tools, and terms that go with this service.