Usability and accessibility-based quality evaluation of Indian airline websites: An MCDM approach

Univers Access Inf Soc. 2022 Jul 17:1-13. doi: 10.1007/s10209-022-00895-7. Online ahead of print.

Abstract

A tourist may be one of the most diverse kinds of consumer, including many people with disabilities. As a technologically driven industry, the tourism industry focused more on providing online services during the COVID-19 pandemic, where physical activity is limited and people practice social distancing. A company's success may be large extend depend on the quality of the website through which they supply their services. The primary goal of the study presented in this paper is to evaluate the overall quality of Indian commercial airline websites. This study evaluated the seven websites of passenger airlines on usability and accessibility parameters using an online diagnostic tool. Page size, load time, response time, broken links, contrast errors were used as the usability parameters, and the TAW tool was used to evaluate the websites' compliance with WCAG 2.0. The paper proposes a system for determining the best website by utilizing the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS), The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), and the Fuzzy AHP methods. The result shows that Indian airline websites have many usability issues, and none of the websites adheres to WCAG 2.0 accessibility guidelines. Friedman's test is applied to compare the ranking given by various MCDM techniques, resulting in no significant difference in the various ranking methods adopted.

Keywords: AHP; Accessibility; Airline websites; Fuzzy AHP; TOPSIS; Usability; WCAG 2.0.