The Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) has learnt that 23 government agencies have failed to make their homepages accessible to users with special needs, reports the Deccan Herald.
Software tools were used to conduct an automated test on the websites of agencies like the National Informatics Centre, Lok Sabha, Rajya Sabha, the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment and the Ministry of HRD. Most of these websites couldn’t fulfil even the basic access criteria set out in the guidelines of the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C).
Nirmita Narasimhan, conductor of the tests at CIS, said, "Except for the Reserve Bank of India and CMC Vellore, all the sites don’t even meet priority 1 of WCAG (W3C Access Guidelines), which would ensure availability of text for non-text elements (images) and other graphical contents that can’t be read out by screen reader software." She said that all of the websites failed in priority 2 and 3 of the guidelines.
Expressing disappointment on the inaccessible document formats and the sites’ failure to serve their purpose, Narasimhan said, "Despite being one of the most important sites for persons with a disability, the homepage of the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, which contains documents and important government schemes for persons with disability, has completely failed to meet the accessibility criteria. This is not only against the spirit of laws that guarantee freedom of information, but also contradicts the government’s own policy of making websites accessible to persons with disability."
Ganesh Prasad, director of systems and process at Samarthanam Trust for the Disabled said that though the test results were obviously disappointing, it didn’t surprise him.
Priority 1 of the guidelines calls for text descriptions of images or alternative pages with text contents, while priority 2 asks for the turning off of auto refresh and other deprecated features of W3C technologies, and recommends the use of semantic information only to help people with disabilities access the contents. X |