This work is financed by the ERDF—European
Regional Development Fund through the Operational Programme
for Competitiveness and Internationalisation—COMPETE 2020
Programme, and by National Funds through the Portuguese funding
agency, FCT-Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia within project
POCI-01-0145-FEDER-031309 entitled “PromoTourVR-Promoting
Tourism Destinations with Multisensory Immersive Media.”
With the increasing use of smartphones in people’s daily lives, mobile accessibility has become a key factor for them. Tourism
is one of the sectors that has benefited the most from this growth but has not yet reached its full potential as accessibility
has not yet been fully exploited. The main goal of this study is to assess accessibility in mobile applications for the tourism
sector. Thus, 14 mobile applications were analyzed, using a manual and automatic methodology through the proposal of an
evaluation model divided by quantitative and qualitative requirements, as well as the use of features such as VoiceOver and
TalkBack. The results show a high overall number of errors in most quantitative requirements as well as non-compliance
with most qualitative requirements. On iPhone 4, “Viseu – Guia da Cidade” was the application with the highest rating, while
on Wiko GOA, it was the “JiTT.Travel Funchal” application. In turn, on iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone XR, Nokia 5.1 and OnePlus
6 devices, the best results were achieved by the “Viseu – Guia da Cidade,” “JiTT.Travel Funchal” and “TUR4all” applications.
Regarding the accessibility of mobile applications on different versions of the same mobile operating system, it was
concluded that there are no differences in their accessibility on both operating systems (iOS and Android). Finally, regarding
the accessibility of applications on smartphones with different screen sizes, there are also no differences in their accessibility.
