A new 2025 report released by WebAIM, a non-profit focused on internet accessibility, has revealed how accessible different websites and sectors are, for the seventh year running. While there has been an improvement overall since 2024, the bad news for travel and tourism is that the industry’s websites are among the worst culprits when it comes to accessibility barriers.
AIM Million found almost 51,000,000 distinct accessibility errors, averaging 51 errors per page, across the one million home pages analysed. That’s an improvement of 10.3% compared to 2024, when the analysis uncovered an average of 56.8 errors per page.
Nearly all home pages are non-compliant with world guidelines
Despite the general improvement since last year, nearly all the websites looked at (94.8%) remain non-compliant with the worldwide accessibility standards laid out in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), AIM found.
Worse, even though an increasing proportion of home pages (79.4%, up 4.8% since 2024) are now using Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) to help make websites more inclusive, those with ARIA present had “over twice as many errors (57 on average) than pages without ARIA (27 on average).”
Government, financial and legal sites do well
AIM also provides a sector-by-sector breakdown, looking at how accessible different categories of site are, and giving a “percentage difference” showing “how much better or worse home pages in that category are than the average home page.”
Government services take first place, with 27% fewer accessibility errors than the average site. They are followed by Personal Finance (-26%); Non-Profit/Charity (21.6%); and Law, Government, & Politics (20.6%) sites. Perhaps ironically, Social Media and Computing and Technology homepages only manage to reach fifth and sixth place respectively.
Travel sites 17.2% worse than average, and deteriorating
The travel sector meanwhile has some soul-searching to do, with some of its biggest names failing to cater properly to the one in six of the global population who live with disability, according to the WHO.
Out of 29 site categories in the AIM ranking, Travel comes 23rd, just six spots from the bottom. Travel-based home pages have 17.2% more accessibility failures than the average, at nearly 60 per page (and that’s worse than 2024 by 17%). Those findings are echoed by web accessibility platform AudioEye, which says 41% of travel and hospitality sites are hard for keyboard users to use.
Naming names, Booking.com, the busiest travel website in the world, boasting over 500 million monthly visits, is in the bottom 30% of the million websites analysed, making it the worst travel company for online accessibility. Airbnb and Trip.com figure at around half way through the ranking, while both Uber and Skyscanner reach the best one per cent.
