The results page is where travelers spend the most time, and it's where reading and comparing flights with a screen reader turns into a slog. Here is what to check on your own results page. Third in Michael Taylor's five-part series on airline booking accessibility.
Continuing with airline website accessibility, this post is about my experience with the flight results page as a blind person. For most people, this is where most of the time on an airline site is spent: browsing, comparing, and choosing a flight to buy. For me, moving through these pages with a screen reader is usually clunky and slow, and I'll get into why here.
Flight Readouts
Flights are shown in a list, and each listing carries the basics: price, departure and arrival airports, times, the airline, seats left, and so on. Off to the right, there's usually a set of seat options and a button to select the flight and proceed. My main problem is how each listing gets spoken.
When I manually move through a listing, each piece of information is announced individually. That makes navigation slow and choppy, and comparing flights nearly impossible, because I can't line up the same details across several options without hunting for each one separately. It works far better for me when everything about one flight is read as a single block with short pauses.
Here's how the speech flows today as I tab through one listing, with each tab advancing my screen reader one stop: "New York" Tab "Orlando" Tab "1:00 PM" Tab, Tab "4:00 PM" Tab "3 Hours Total Travel Time" Tab "$259 Per Traveler" Tab "3 Left At This Price." What I'd want instead is one element read straight through: "New York to Orlando, 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM, 3 Hours Total Travel Time, $259 Per Traveler, 3 Left At This Price."
The catch is the action buttons. They can't be folded into that single text block, because if they are, I can't isolate the button to select the flight.
Selecting A Flight
Actually choosing a flight is often where things fall apart. Each listing usually has a few small boxes lined up to the right, one per seat type like economy, business, or first, each showing the name, price, and seats left. Some sites put a "Buy" or "Continue" button inside the box, and others make the whole box the button.
The trouble is that the contents of each box often register to my screen reader as plain static text. That's especially bad when the box itself is supposed to be the button, because then there's nothing for me to activate.
There's a usability side too. Trying to satisfy guidelines, some sites bury each box under a long, meandering label that runs several sentences of filler. Here's one I hit: "This Option Is For The Basic Economy Fare. Selecting It Will Proceed With This Fare at $159. Activate To Choose Type." That could be said in a fraction of the words.
In other cases I simply can't get focus into the area where I'd pick a seat type at all. When that happens, I can hear the flight details but have no way to act on them.
Price Trend Graphs
A lot of flight shopping comes down to watching prices and booking when they dip. To help with that, many airline sites now show a line graph of price trends for a flight and similar ones over time. The idea is to judge whether a price might drop and time the purchase.
Those graphs are purely visual, so my screen reader can't read them. And there's almost never a text version that describes the recent trend in words. Without that, I'm shut out of the timing decision that sighted travelers get to make.
So the page where everyone else spends their time comparing options is the one that slows me down the most. On the airline sites I've used, reading and comparing flights by ear is still a fight every time.
Airline Flight Results Accessibility: FAQ
Why is it hard to compare flights with a screen reader?
Flight results are hard to compare when each listing is read out one fragment at a time. Michael describes tabbing through a single flight and hearing the city, then the time, then the price as separate stops, making it almost impossible to line up the same detail across flights. It's the same fragmented-list pattern he found in chain restaurant menus, where grouping details into one readable element, with action buttons kept separate, is what makes comparison workable.
Are flight price trend graphs accessible to blind users?
Price trend graphs are usually not accessible, because they convey information through a visual line with no text equivalent. A screen reader can't interpret the graph, and Michael rarely finds a written summary of the trend alongside it. A short text description of the trend is the fix. The same visual-only patterns turn up well beyond airlines, across hospitality and food service booking sites.
What is a static text issue on a flight results page?
A static text issue occurs when an interactive control is read by a screen reader as plain, unclickable text. Michael runs into this when a seat-type box is meant to be the selection button but exposes no way to activate it. An automated accessibility testing tool surfaces many of these mislabeled controls.
When a screen reader can't read or select a flight, the whole results page becomes a dead end, and that's the kind of barrier that drives ADA web accessibility claims. Partial fixes don't remove the exposure.
What law requires airline websites to be accessible?
U.S. Department of Transportation rules under the Air Carrier Access Act (ACAA) require covered airline websites that market air travel to the U.S. public to meet WCAG 2.0 Level AA.
Learn more about U.S. digital accessibility laws and requirements.
For more on accessibility in travel and hospitality, see UsableNet’s resources.
Addressing Airline Website Accessibility Barriers
Check-in barriers such as read-only fields and unlabeled buttons can create accessibility issues for travelers with disabilities and may also affect compliance with federal accessibility requirements for airline websites.
If a screen reader can't read or compare your flight listings, talk to a UsableNet accessibility expert.
Related in this series: Online Check-In Barriers, Flight Search Fields That Fail Screen Reader Users, Flight Filters That Break for Screen Reader Users, Comparing Flight Results while Blind, and Booking and Seat Selection While Blind
