socialmedian: Indian websites flout guidelines for the disabled

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Indian websites flout guidelines for the disabled

Source: Accessibility in the News

Oct 07, 2009

Summary

But government's draft National Policy for Electronic Accessibility offers some hope. Last month, Deepak Kumar (name changed on request), a businessman who is visually-impaired, logged on to check out for some information on the newly-created Rajya Sabha website. Given the government's assurance this February that at least 50 important government websites would be made disabled-friendly and accessible, he should have faced no problems. However, there were accessibility problems galore. For instance, there were inappropriate alternate texts, no means to control the moving content, missing form labels, and code (XHTML) that did not match the world wide web consortium (W3C) specifications, all in violation of guidelines provided by the Indian government itself. Moreover, links leading to external websites existed but users were not informed about the same in advance, thus creating more problems for people with disabilities. The very title for the homepage of the website "Rajya Sabha, Parliament of India" failed to describe that it is the homepage.

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