Sector guide · Transport & events

BFSG for ticketing and passenger transport

Selling a journey or a seat to a consumer puts you in scope: the booking flow, the timetable, the seat map, the check-in, the ticket itself and the machine in the station.

  • Booking, check-in and ticket delivery in scope
  • Self-service machines are separate products
  • Seat maps are the classic failure

What is covered

  • Websites and apps that sell tickets to consumers
  • Timetable and real-time travel information, including disruption notices
  • Electronic tickets and the wallet or PDF you deliver them in
  • Self-service ticket machines and check-in terminals, as products in their own right
  • Event ticketing, which the law treats no differently from a train ticket

Sector guide · Transport & events

Where ticketing fails

  • Seat maps with no alternative

    An interactive seat map that only responds to pointer input, with no list of available seats and no way to pick one with a keyboard. It is the clearest 2.1.1 failure in the sector.

  • Countdowns on the booking

    “Your seats are held for 07:59.” A hard countdown with no extension fails 2.2.1, and the people most likely to need longer are exactly the ones it locks out.

  • Timetables as data tables without headers

    Departure boards rendered as grids of divs, or as tables with no header cells, so a screen reader reads times with nothing attaching them to a destination.

  • Tickets as untagged images

    The ticket PDF is a picture with a barcode. The seat, the coach and the time exist nowhere as text.

Criteria to check first

Each links to a plain-language page on that criterion: what it asks for, how it fails in practice, and how far an automated check can get.

All WCAG 2.2 AA criteria

Where to start

  1. Book a ticket with the keyboard

    Search, choose, seat, pay, receive. If you cannot finish it without touching the mouse, neither can a proportion of your customers.

  2. Give the seat map a list

    Keep the map. Add a list of available seats with the same information, operable the same way. That is usually a day of work and closes the worst finding in the sector.

  3. Make the ticket text

    Whatever the visual design, the ticket needs its details as real text — in the PDF, in the email, in the wallet pass.

  4. Assess machines separately

    Terminals are products with their own annex in the law. No web scan touches them, and they need their own record.

Questions operators ask

We are a small events organiser using a third-party ticketing platform. Who is responsible?

Both of you, for different things. The platform is responsible for the service it provides; you are responsible for the service you offer under your own name, including the pages you configure and the theme you chose. In practice, ask your platform for their accessibility statement and test what your customers actually see.

Does the exemption for micro-enterprises help us?

Possibly — the service exemption is fewer than 10 employees and under €2m turnover. Note that it exempts you from the obligations, not from the fact that people who cannot use the booking will not book.

Written to be useful, not to be legal advice. It reflects our reading of the BFSG and EN 301 549 as of 2026-09-13; for a binding assessment of your obligations, ask a lawyer.

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