Title - Access limited

Some of the top government websites continue to remain disabled unfriendly, even three years after the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh ordered for them to be made accessible.The National Portal of India, Ministry of Tourism, Human Resource Development and the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances are some of the websites that continue to remain inaccessible to persons with disabilities in general and people with visual impairment, print impairment and hearing impairment, in particular. This was recently pointed out in an accessibility survey commissioned by the National Centre for Promotion of Employment for Disabled People (NCPEDP). The Centre’s honorary director Javed Abidi says, “What is even more ironic is that some of them have made tall claims about being accessible and when tested, failed miserably. While most people take tasks including booking a cinema ticket or shopping online; or filing tax returns, applying for passports and booking railway tickets, through the internet for granted, for many persons with disabilities, this is an impossible task.” Javed and his team have written to the Prime Minister expressing concern and demanding immediate intervention. The issue of inaccessible websites was highlighted by the NCPEDP in 2009 and after a public outcry the Prime Minister’s Office intervened. Guidelines by National Information Centre (NIC) were then issued to make all websites in the public domain accessible and disabled friendly. Recently on the NCPEDP’s request, Barrier Break Technologies (BBT) conducted an audit of 10 Government websites and it was disappointing and shocking to find out that not a single one of them is truly accessible, says Javed.

“We were quite shocked to notice that the websites were not accessible in spite of the fact that each of them has put an accessibility statement on their website to mislead visitors,” says Javed. The survey was aimed at evaluating the level of accessibility of different Government of India (GOI) websites at the central as well as state level. The websites were chosen on the basis of the accessibility claims stated on their web pages to verify if these sites were actually accessible for persons with disabilities. The accessibility survey revealed that persons with disabilities found it difficult to access the web pages tested. Automated tests revealed that the pages failed to meet even the minimum accessibility compliance requirements of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. In addition, the tested pages lacked valid HTML and CSS mark up.

“This is a gross discrimination against persons with disabilities and a shame in a country that boasts to be a superpower when it comes to IT,” says Javed. Shilpi Kapoor, managing director, BBT, says, “Persons with disabilities use different assistive technologies to browse the web. However, if the websites are not constructed as per the WCAG, the assistive technology fails to read them and thus, barring a person with disability from accessing the website.” The NIC guidelines known as the Guidelines for Indian Government Websites (GIGW) mandate that all Government websites should conform to the international accessibility standards, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the WCAG 2.0.