Accessibility is about creating welcoming digital experiences for all travelers. Making sure your short-term vacation rental hosted website is accessible ensures all travelers, regardless of their abilities, can easily find, understand, and book their ideal getaway.
Why Accessibility Matters
Accessibility is a commitment to inclusive hospitality. By ensuring your vacation rental website caters to diverse user needs, you can welcome all travelers and broaden your customer base. Prioritizing web accessibility for your vacation rental hosted website is beneficial for your short-term rental business. Not only that, web-accessible websites improve search engine rankings and enhance your brand perception, signaling that inclusivity is vital to your exceptional hospitality.
While short-term vacation rentals are not specifically mentioned in Businesses that are open to the public (Title III), which prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities by businesses open to the public (also referred to as “public accommodations” under the ADA), all hotels, inns, and motels are subject to Title III.
For more information, see the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Guidance on Web Accessibility and the ADA article.
Hosted Website Design Essentials
Web accessibility is very important to OwnerRez, and our hosted websites are designed with this in mind. However, you can still take many actions to ensure your hosted website is accessible by verifying the following elements.
- High color contrast. Aim for a high contrast ratio between text and background colors. Sufficient contrast makes text easier to read, especially for people with low vision or color blindness.
- Readable fonts. For optimal web accessibility, choose simple, easily distinguishable fonts like Arial, Verdana, Calibri, Helvetica, Tahoma, Open Sans, or Lato, ensuring sufficient size, spacing, and contrast with the background.
- Clear, descriptive link text. Use clear and concise link text that accurately describes the destination of the link, avoiding vague phrases like "click here" or "read more."
- Alternative text for images. Alternative text (Alt text) should concisely describe the image's content and context, allowing screen reader users to access the information conveyed visually unless the image is purely decorative. See the Photo Tags section of our Photos Overview support article.
Practical Steps
What can you do to ensure that your hosted website is web accessible?
- You can conduct regular web accessibility audits yourself by using web accessibility testing tools, such as the free WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool.
- Refer to the Hosted Website Design Essentials section to discover ways to enhance your hosted website's web accessibility.
- Create an accessibility statement, a public statement of your organization’s commitment to digital accessibility.
Property Accessibility
Ensuring web accessibility for your hosted website is important, but it is also essential to inform potential guests about your property's accessibility features. For more information on that topic, see the Accessibility Settings section of our Amenities support article.