Springer-Verlag has several papers avialable online that may be of use to those promoting barrier-free tourism:
Its Time to Make eTourism Accessible
Franz Pühretmair
Abstract
Nearly half of all handicapped people would travel more frequently, if there were more barrier-free offers. And about 40 percent have already renounced a travel because adequate offers were missing (Max Stich, ADAC vice-president for tourism, 2003). So far the tourism industry still has hardly recognized the potential and the value of barrier-free tourism. As long as the tourism industry will not identify that barrier-free tourism is an indicator for quality, a trademark and a competitive advantage they will not attract its considerable market-share. Often the lack of not supporting barrier-free tourism is a combination of missing offers and inadequate or missing information presentation.
Tourism Information Systems Promoting Barrier-Free Tourism for People with Disabilities
Hildegard Rumetshofer and Wolfram Wöß
Abstract
Providing comprehensive accessibility is the major challenge for tourism service providers to address people with disabilities (and older people) as growing consumer groups. Information about accessibility of tourism objects (accommodation, sights, streets, parks, etc.) is equally important as barrier-free tourism information systems to support the booking and decision making process.
Consequently, this paper introduces the extension of tourism information systems in a twofold way. First, each tourism object is provided with information about its accessibility realized by additional meta data information. Second, based on user profiles content presentation and user interface navigation are dynamically adapted to the users individual needs in order to support appropriate search as well as presentation features.
AccesSights – A Multimodal Location-Aware Mobile Tourist Information System
Abstract
Through recent developments in the segment of mobile devices like personal digital assistants (PDA) the usage of mobile applications in different areas of our normal life increases. New applications support mobile users with location-aware information. But todays systems are not usable for all: there still exist various barriers for blind and visually impaired people. This user group does not receives the same information as normally sighted users. AccesSights overcomes these barriers by supporting both user groups with the same information. Meeting the different user requirements we designed a multimodal user interface to support different user groups – each in their suitable fashion. The introduced AccesSights system is based on our highly flexible and modular Niccimon platform.
Palle Klante , Jens Krösche and Susanne Boll