USABILITY AND ACCESSIBILITY ANALYSIS AND EVALUATION OF E-TOURISM SECTOR IN BANGLADESH by Sumonto Sarker Lecturer Department of Telecommunication and Electronic Engineering, Hajee Mohammed Danesh Science & Technology University, Dinajpur, Bangladesh. kishor_hstu@yahoo.com & M Mukaddim Islam Researcher Institute of Information Technology, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. tanim_mmi@yahoo.com & Rimi Rashid Researcher Institute of Information Technology, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. rimichan15@gmail.com ABSTRACT Tourism is an information based business. Tourists have to leave their daily environment for consuming the product. At the beginning of the 21st century, the structure of demand and supply in the tourism industry is undergoing significant changes. Social and economic changes, for instance age profile, life styles and organization of work, together with the fast distribution of the Internet, increasing e-business and the availability of online public services have had a strong impact on the demand for tourism products and their modes of provision. After connect internet and information technology a dramatically change happened in tourism sector. Now a day s e-tourism is one of the most important sectors in today s business world. The implication of ICT in a tourism sector is now very common for developed countries but developing countries are still struggling for e- tourism development. Tourism sector of developing countries can t give proper accessibility of their web which could be play a vital role for their business. An accessible web can help elderly population and also people with disabilities more actively contribute in society. In this paper, researchers analyze and evaluate accessibility of tourism websites of Bangladesh in perspective of developing countries. Page 119 of 126
International Journal of Research & Development in KEYWORDS: Accessibility Evaluation Tools, Accessibility Guideline, Bangladesh, e- tourism, Web Accessibility, Web Usability. 1. INTRODUCTION Tourism has become a very important and dynamic sector both in the world economy and particular in the developing countries. Its growth affects not only the activities directly linked to tourism but also other sectors. Tourism is already an important sector in some developing countries and will become so for others. Developing countries have been fast growing in tourism industry terms in the world over the last decade. Tourism is one of the most important sectors in a large number of developing countries. Bangladesh is a developing country in Asia, holding high potentiality for tourism. Information and Communication technology plays a big role to connect the people over the world. Government in developing countries also encourages people to adapt the technology for growing up so fast with the developed country. Now a day s all sector try to grow up their opportunity through internet. People can buy anything from anywhere through the web page. Web is an existing technological tool through which people can communicate and get many advantage. It does require innovative and easily access able design that everyone can use it. The term Accessibility is defined as the ability to access. So web accessibility is defined as the ability to access the web easily by any kind of people as well as from any kind of devices such as: desktop, laptop, mobile, tab, notepad etc. Most of the people want more information and support from the web page. If they can t access the site properly it keeps them behind the technological evolution. Government of our country takes a vision for 2021 that makes Digital Bangladesh where all people from ministry to village can easily access information through internet and can take all facility from internet. So it is important for any sector in Bangladesh to build up a high quality web page that all kind of people can access this page and can get all kind of facility from that page. In Bangladesh the estimated number of person with disabilities is around 10% of its total population (Country profile of disabilities, People Republic of Bangladesh, 2002). The people of disability are more neglected part of society. They can t participate of our national growth. But time should be changed. Due to the globalization if we keep our people of disabilities in the room, we can t fight with other developed country where all kind of people of developed country have participated their national development. We analyze primarily 12 websites of tourism sector in Bangladesh which are available in internet to access its accessibility. Our aims to investigate whether the websites conform to international accessibility guidelines W3C WCAG 1.0 (WCAG 1.0, 1999) or not and if not, what are the reasons behind that. 2. CURRENT STATUS OF e-tourism WEBSITES IN BANGLADESH Tourism is one of the most promising sectors for Bangladesh with her huge natural beauty, heroic historical background and archaeological resources. Bangladesh is a country of natural beauty.. The duty of proper authority is to make it handy for the interest group both from home and abroad. The advertisement is very much necessary for any publishing. If we can publish our tourism sector it can be give us a giant feedback. We have some websites which are help to Page 120 of 126
the tourist by giving much information about the location. It also gives the residential support to the tourist. For our research here we will use 12 websites which are advertising our tourism sector. These are given bellow. www.parjatan.gov.bd www.bangladesh.gov.bd www.primetourism.net.bd www.travelbd.com www.bdwebguide.com/tourist-info.htm www.tripadvisor.com www.stourismbangladesh.com www.discoverybangladesh.com www.mangrovebd.com www.parjatan.org www.parjatanbd.com www.bangladesh.saarctourism.org The above websites are representing the tourism sector of Bangladesh. Most of them are contributed by the private travel company or Hotel Company. They use the websites to communicate with the tourists which are interested to travel. 3. WEB ACCESSIBILITY AND ITS IMPACT The use of information and communication technology (ICT) has been playing a vital role in the 21 st century due to globalization and the governments of the developing countries are being encouraged to adapting with the coming future. Though Web is an exciting technological tool to communicate with people, it does require innovative and easily familiar design to make it accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities. The Web has been blessed for all people regardless of their economic, social, political, cultural, mental or physical condition and behavior. But the proper utilization and distribution of the benefits of web is crucial. It is essential that the web be accessible to people with equal access and equal opportunity to all also with disabilities. The Accessibility can be defined as the quality of a web site that makes it possible for people to use it to find it navigable and understandable even when they are working under limiting conditions or constraints (Henry, 2006). Each page of the site has many images such as users avatars, products image etc. Can a blind person or with very low vision be able to browse the pages and get the service? Another thing may happen; users sometimes want to browse web pages without downloading images due to very low internet speed. So the web should provide proper information (e.g. alternative text) in the case of missing images. Accessibility is about designing so that more people can use your web site effectively in as many situations as possible. Due to increase the growth of mobile user Accessibility also should ensure that people can use their web through mobile. Page 121 of 126
3.1 Web Accessibility Guidelines A numerous efforts and works for establishing standard Web Accessibility Guidelines are governed by many web-groups and organization separately or in cooperatively with World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) (Henry, 2006). In 1997, the World Wide Web Consortium established the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI http://www.w3.org/wai) and in 1999 the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0 (WCAG 1.0, 1999) were finalized as a recommendation. Its primary goal was to promote and achieve Web functionality for people with disabilities. 3.2 Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools Web accessibility evaluation tools are software programs or online services that are used to check your website s accessibility level under web accessibility guidelines. There is a huge number of accessibility tools for commercial purposes or freely available on the web such as: WatchFire Bobby, AChecker (Achecker - Web accessibility evaluation tool, 2011), Cynthia Says (HiSoftware Cynthia Says,2012), EvalAccess (EvalAccess 2.0, 2006) etc. A complete list of accessibility evaluation tools is in W3C (List of Accessibility Tools, 2006). These tools are very useful for programmers and designers to determine whether or not their sites follow WCAG. 3.3 Evaluating Accessibility Now we want to evaluate the accessibility of the previous websites. The accessibility tools produced a report of all accessibility problems for the selected guidelines WCGA 1.0. First validate each of the previous websites using W3C Markup Validation Service (W3C Markup Validation Service, 1994) and then used a online web accessibility tools: AChecker (Public AChecker, 2011). Finally we checked web Accessibility on mobile using online Web accessibility tools for Mobile: Mobile Checker. 3.3.1 Validation check Validation is the first step in evaluating web accessibility. If the website doesn t validate to W3C standards, it may preventing assistive technology users from accessing the web pages. This validator checks the markup validity of Web documents in HTML, XHTML, SMIL, MathML, etc. When checking with W3C Markup Validation Service then it need to manually put the URL of each websites and listed the result as in Table. Page 122 of 126
3.3.2 Achecker s Review The AChecker identifies 3 types of problems: Known problems: These are problems that have been identified with certainty as accessibility barriers. You must modify your page to fix these problems; Likely problems: These are problems that have been identified as probable barriers, but require a human to make a decision. You will likely need to modify your page to fix these problems. Potential problems: These are problems that the Checker cannot identify, that require a human decision. You may have to modify your page for these problems, but in many cases you will just need to confirm that the problem described is not present. We are avoiding this type of errors for our convenience. 4. RESULT 3.3.3 Web accessibility for mobile Now a day s technology is growing so fast rate. The number of mobile phone users has reached at 114.808 million at the end of January, 2014 in Bangladesh with a new addition of 1.33 million, reports BBN. Due to increasing the modern technology the growing rate is rising so high and people use the mobile as a part of life. Within ten years the increasing rate is so high. The number of internet user is also increasing in high rate. Where now the number of internet user from mobile is much greater than pc. So if mobile user can access the sites they can get information from anywhere. But most of the websites can t access through mobile phone. It is a big lack for the technology and also for the tourism sector. The evaluation results found in various phase are listed below in tabular form in Table 1, table 2 and Table 3. Using the validation check (Table 1) we found that most of the websites has much more errors and warning. On the other hand, AChecker s review (Table 2) reveals that no one of the previous websites of tourism sector of Bangladesh passed any conformance level. It means that the mandatory checklist which must be satisfied ensure that accessibility are absent in the websites. So according to the AChecker s review we can decide that the lack of accessibility in Bangladeshi tourism websites is severe. From the Mobile Checke s review (Table 3), we found that only one websites can access from the mobile easily though 33% information can t access but other websites can t access and can t get the information from the mobile. It is a big lack for the technology and also for the tourism sector. Page 123 of 126
Table 1: Markup validity check result Website (Single page) Errors Warnings www.parjatan.gov.bd 41 1 www.bangladesh.gov.bd 101 30 www.primetourism.net.bd 45 4 www.travelbd.com 12 2 www.stourismbangladesh.com 51 23 www.discoverybangladesh.com 15 2 www.mangrovebd.com 65 1 www.parjatan.org 3 2 www.parjatanbd.com 259 23 Table 2: AChecker s review result of previous websites. Website (Single page) Known Problem Likely Problem Potential Problem www.parjatan.gov.bd 2 0 23 www.bangladesh.gov.bd 139 0 362 www.primetourism.net.bd 254 0 192 www.travelbd.com 20 0 244 www.stourismbangladesh.com 86 3 479 www.discoverybangladesh.com 69 4 173 www.mangrovebd.com 7 0 30 www.parjatan.org 50 10 62 www.parjatanbd.com 69 0 258 Table 3 The rating of websites about mobile accessibility. Websites Mobile friendly rating in (%) www.parjatan.gov.bd 0 www.bangladesh.gov.bd 0 www.primetourism.net.bd 0 www.travelbd.com 17 www.stourismbangladesh.com 0 www.discoverybangladesh.com 11 www.mangrovebd.com 64 www.parjatan.org 67 www.parjatanbd.com 0 5. DISCUSSION From the above result we can find out that most of the websites of tourism sector in Bangladesh remain weak. These websites always focus the tourism sector of Bangladesh and Page 124 of 126
people all over the world get information from theses web sites, but the situation is not so good. We find that no one of these web site follow web accessibility guideline. every web page has so many error, warning and so much problems. Only 2 web sites have mobile friendly rating over 50%. And most of them have no access on mobile. It is the actual figure of a developing country like Bangladesh. The technological site is really vulnerable in Bangladesh though government would like to make a Digital Bangladesh within 2021 and for that take so many steps and give big fund to develop the IT sector. The vulnerable situation is not only for tourism sector but also the government web site. Researcher Mrinal Kanti Baowaly also found the same result for most of the Government web site in his research Accessibility Analysis and Evaluation of Government-Websites in Developing Countries: Case Study Bangladesh (2012). He also found that most of the government website of Bangladesh remains weak due to the lack of proper web accessibility guideline. This research is also agree with him that the developing country like Bangladesh need so much awareness to build up their web site so much access able and usable for all kind of people otherwise the developing country like Bangladesh always remain dark side and can t forward with the same speed of other developed country. 6. CONCLUSION The research provides an accessibility status of Tourism websites in Bangladesh, as a developing country in Asia. Similar situation may happen in other developing countries in the world. It also revealed that there exists a wealth of accessibility resources and accessibility guidelines that are usable and coherent; yet lack of awareness impedes their use. It seems that the tourism sector have not yet grasped the importance of providing services for that part of the population with special needs. It should work on spreading awareness of equal opportunity for all clients, e.g. disabled as well as non-disabled visitors to websites. Based on the work described in this paper, the authors would like to recommend the following issues as critical initial steps forwards: Every sector should either adapt the existing web accessibility guidelines or develop its own guidelines that are appropriate for their context. Also, government should set a policy for web accessibility together with an enforcement procedure e.g. making the accessibility of websites a compulsory requirement. An incentive or reward for those who accommodate website accessibility may promote good web accessibility. 7. REFERENCES J. Cardoso, E-tourism: Creating Dynamic Packages using Semantic Web Processes (2005),[Online], http://www.w3.org/2005/04/fsws/submissions/16/paper.html C. Kim, E-tourism: An Innovative Approach for the Small and Medium-sized Tourism Enterprises (SMITEs) in Korea (2000),http://www.oecd.org/ dataoecd/ 56/13/3426804 8.pdf Sultana, Z. (2010) 'Agony of Persons with Disability - A Comparative Study of Bangladesh', Journal of Politics and Law, vol. 3, no. 2, September. Page 125 of 126
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