Work

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

Year: 2025

Type: article

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.

Source: IEEE Access

DOI: 10.1109/access.2025.3575725

Authors: César González-Mora, Irene Garrigós, Marco A. Celdrán-Bernabeu, David Giner-Sánchez, Jose-Norberto Mazón

Institution: University of Alicante

Language: English

Topic: Digital Accessibility for Disabilities

Subfield: Human Factors and Ergonomics

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Reduced inequalities

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $2,075