Letter and Spirit
For millions out of the 70-100 mn people with disabilities, booking a cinema ticket, shopping online, filing tax returns, applying for a passport, or booking railway tickets, remains an impossibility. Three years back, the Prime Minister’s Office issued a directive to make all government websites in the public domain accessible and disabled friendly, But even now some top government websites like the National Portal of India (httpJ//www.india.gov. in), Ministry of Tourism (httpJ//www.tourism.gov.in), Ministry of Human Resource Development (httpJ//www. mhrd.gov.in), Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances (httpJ//darpg.nic.in) continue to remain inaccessible to persons with disabilities.
This is shameful for a country like India, the aspiring IT powerhouse of the world, where mobile phones have one of the highest in the world penetration and the internet is taken for granted.
Inaccessibility of websites, specially those of various government departments and their services had come up in 2009 and the NCPNDP along with most of the NGOs in the disability sector took up the matter in a big way. The media outcry that followed led the Prime Minister’s Office to intervene. Subsequently, NIC issued guidelines to make all websites in the public domain accessible and disabled friendly.
Persons with disabilities use different assistive technologies to browse the web. However if the websites are not constructed as per the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), the assistive technology fails to read them, 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 Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0.
Several government websites today claim to be accessible and have an accessibility statement, however, the question that comes to mind is how far are these websites accessible in reality?
When NCPNDP commissioned BarrierBreak Technologies to conduct an audit of 10 government websites to evaluate the level of accessibility of different Government of India websites at the central as well as state level, it was found that not a single one of them is accessible to the disabled. 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. Clearly, it is a case of bureaucrats not being worried; and political leaders hardly care. So, what’s the road ahead? It is not enough to have the intent. You have to follow it in letter and spirit. It’s great that all government websites have accessibility statements but they also have to ensure that their websites are constructed to be ‘actually’ accessible.
<ibrahima@cybermedia.co.in>