Accessibility Evaluation on Ethiopian and South African Airlines Website and Mobile Applications

Abstract

Air transport is one of the major transportation modes in Africa. It has been showing a growth due to significant increase of tourist flights and intercontinental flights. Ethiopian Airlines and South African Airlines are the leading airlines in Africa in terms of working capacity and annual profit. Both Ethiopian and South African Airlines have a website that lets their customers search and book a flight. They also have a mobile application for both android and iOS platforms. The airline industry in Africa is facing market competition from different airlines outside the continent. The competition is getting intense due to the usage of different technological artifacts in the air transport infrastructure by competitors. The development of an accessible and usable website and mobile application for flight booking and related services can help African airlines to compete well. This paper is about evaluating the accessibility of Ethiopian and South African airlines’ websites and mobile applications using manual and automatic accessibility evaluation techniques. As per the evaluation result, both airlines shall work hard to inclusively design their interactive online reservation systems. To do so, they need to consider the seven principles of Universal Design whenever they enhance their interactive systems.