Accessibility

Every day, millions of people with visual, auditory, motor or cognitive disabilities attempt to access digital services, book a hotel, consult financial information, complete an online purchase. For many of them, what should be an ordinary operation becomes an obstacle, or a closed door. Digital accessibility is the discipline concerned with removing those obstacles.

It is not a matter of courtesy or social sensitivity: it is a right recognised by international standards, a legal obligation in numerous jurisdictions, and an increasingly determining factor of reputation and competitiveness for organisations operating in the digital space.

The ISO 9241-210 standard frames accessibility within human-centred design, defining it as the extent to which products, systems, services, environments and facilities can be used by people with the widest range of capabilities to achieve specified goals in a specified context of use. A definition that immediately clarifies two things: accessibility does not concern only people with permanent disabilities, and it cannot be separated from the real context in which interaction takes place.

The regulatory framework: EAA and ADA

Digital accessibility is today governed by an articulated and rapidly evolving regulatory framework, with concrete obligations for organisations operating in the European and North American markets.

European Accessibility Act

The European Accessibility Act (EAA), with a transposition deadline for Member States of June 2025, establishes harmonised accessibility requirements for a wide range of digital products and services: websites, mobile applications, e-commerce, banking services, booking systems, self-service terminals and much more. The technical reference for conformance is the EN 301 549 standard, which in turn incorporates the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1) of the W3C as the reference standard for digital content. Organisations that do not comply expose themselves to administrative sanctions, infringement proceedings and significant reputational risks.

Americans with Disabilities Act

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), in its application to the digital context developed through extensive federal case law, requires operators of public and commercial services to ensure that their digital environments are accessible to people with disabilities. The American hospitality sector has been in recent years one of the most exposed to litigation: numerous chains have had to face class actions brought by users with visual disabilities who were unable to complete online bookings independently, resulting in notable judgements and out-of-court settlements.

Esario has developed specific and documented expertise in both regulatory contexts, with direct and significant experience in the American hospitality market.

Esario's experience in the American hospitality sector

The American hospitality sector has for years represented particularly exposed ground for digital accessibility litigation. Hotel booking websites — often built on proprietary platforms or CMS systems not optimised for accessibility — presented systematic barriers for users who rely on assistive technologies such as screen readers: images without alternative text, booking forms not navigable by keyboard, date selection calendars that were inaccessible, checkout procedures incompatible with the main screen readers.

Esario has conducted numerous accessibility audits for American hotel chains that needed to respond to class actions or prevent future litigation. The audit process developed by Esario integrates automated technical evaluation, manual inspection by certified experts and testing with real users who use assistive technologies — producing a comprehensive assessment of conformance with WCAG standards and a remediation plan prioritised by impact and complexity of intervention.

Accessibility and quality of experience: an inseparable connection

A recurring misconception in the way organisations approach accessibility is treating it as a separate compliance task, detached from the design process — a checklist of technical requirements to be satisfied after a project has already been completed. This approach is not only methodologically incorrect, but systematically more costly and less effective than integrating accessibility from the earliest phases of design.

Research has repeatedly demonstrated that accessibility solutions designed retrospectively tend to be fragile, partial and difficult to maintain over time. Conversely, when accessibility is considered as a dimension of user-centred design from the outset, the resulting solutions are more robust, more coherent with the overall experience, and often improve usability for all users — not only those with disabilities.

This is the principle of universal design: designing systems that work for the widest possible range of people, capabilities and contexts, not as an optional extension but as an intrinsic quality of the project. An accessible hotel booking website is a website that works better for anyone who uses it, regardless of device, connection, lighting conditions or the user's level of digital experience.

Accessibility and Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence is introducing new and concrete tools to support accessibility evaluation and design processes, accelerating certain phases of the work without replacing the expert competence that remains indispensable.

In the audit phase, AI-based automated analysis tools make it possible to perform systematic scans of complex digital systems, identifying WCAG standard violations at scale and in significantly less time than manual inspection alone. These tools are particularly effective at detecting categories of structural and recurring problems — missing alternative text, insufficient colour contrast, unlabelled form fields and incorrect semantic markup structure.

In the testing phase, AI-based simulation models can replicate the behaviour of common assistive technologies such as screen readers, making it possible to identify interaction barriers before testing with real users takes place. This does not replace testing with real people — which remains the most reliable method for detecting contextual and subjective accessibility problems — but it complements it and makes it more efficient.

In continuous monitoring, AI systems applied to real usage data can detect signals of access difficulty from users employing assistive technologies, identifying accessibility regressions introduced by system updates before these become the subject of reports or litigation.

In content generation, language models can assist in producing alternative text for images, in simplifying language for users with cognitive disabilities, and in verifying the readability and comprehensibility of content according to WCAG criteria.