A New Framework for Accessible Tourism Mobile Application Development

Recent years have seen an increasing realization of the importance and potential of accessible tourism. To support it, the ICT industries have provided many different applications, especially for mobile computing frameworks. An analysis of these applications allows us to identify some issues that are not yet fully addressed. These include the absence of collaborative features; the lack of involvement of all stakeholders; the inexistence of synergies; the lack of widely accessible geographic databases and the limited scope of focus within the disability range. To tackle some of these issues, the authors propose a common framework for development of tourism accessible related applications. This framework stores and manages tourism information and makes this information available to be used by mobile applications developers through specific web services. This approach can represent an important contribution to accessible tourism, by decreasing the cost and facilitating the development of new applications supporting new products and services.