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Accessibility of Government Websites in India: A Report

Posted by Nirmita Narasimhan, Mukesh Sharma and Dinesh Kaushal at Sep 26, 2012 08:16 AM |
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The Centre for Internet & Society is pleased to announce the publication of a report on the accessibility of government websites in India. The report is published in cooperation with the Hans Foundation. Nirmita Narasimhan, Mukesh Sharma and Dinesh Kaushal are the authors.
Accessibility of Government Websites in India: A Report

Above is the front cover with the title of the report and names of the authors

Executive Summary

Website inaccessibility is the largest and most common barrier to implementing effective e-governance. In a country like India, where a very large percentage of the population is disabled, elderly, illiterate, rural, having limited bandwidth, speaks only a vernacular language or uses alternative platforms like mobile phones, having accessible websites becomes all the more important to ensure that government information and services which are available online are accessible and usable by these groups.

This report summarises the key findings of a test conducted to measure the accessibility of 7800 websites of the Government of India and its affiliated agencies against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, which is the universally accepted standard for web accessibility. It uses a combination of automated and manual testing to derive key findings. While the automated tool identified errors such as images without textual descriptions and HTML and CSS errors, manual testing was used wherever human decision was required, for instance, to judge whether a description of a link or image was indeed accurate, or to check for accessibility of forms.


Table of Contents

Executive Summary

  • Highlights

Introduction

  • What is Accessibility?

Methodology

Findings and Interpretation

  • Known, Likely and Potential Problems
  • HTML and CSS Validation
  • Alternate Text for Non-text Objects

Recommendations

  • Appendix 1: Examples of Errors
  • Appendix 2: About the National Policy on Universal Electronic Accessibility
  • Appendix 3: List of Testers and Authors

Given below is the link to download the full report:

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