Digital accessibility in India

Digital accessibility in India is the practice of designing and providing websites, mobile applications, electronic documents and other information and communications technology (ICT) in India so that persons with disabilities can use them. The 2011 census of India counted 26.8 million persons with disabilities, or 2.21 per cent of the population, and later surveys put the figure higher.

Accessibility of ICT is required by sections 40 to 46 of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016, which give effect in India to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The main technical instruments are the Guidelines for Indian Government Websites (GIGW), issued by the National Informatics Centre for government websites and applications, and IS 17802, the accessibility standard published by the Bureau of Indian Standards and made applicable to a wide range of ICT products and services by amendments to the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Rules in 2023. Both are based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) of the World Wide Web Consortium.

Enforcement has been the weak point. In Rajive Raturi v. Union of India (2024) the Supreme Court of India held that the accessibility rules then in force were framed as recommendations rather than binding standards and were therefore contrary to the Act, and in Pragya Prasun v. Union of India (2025) it held that the right to digital access forms part of the right to life under Article 21 of the Constitution of India. Draft amendment rules published in July 2026 would make IS 17802 compulsory and require establishments to publish accessibility conformance reports.

Legal framework

Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016

India signed the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2007. The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 replaced the Persons with Disabilities Act of 1995 and recognises twenty-one disabilities. Chapter VIII of the Act, comprising sections 40 to 46, deals with accessibility. Section 40 requires the Central Government to prescribe accessibility standards for the physical environment, transport and information and communication technology. Section 42 deals specifically with access to information and communication technology and requires that all content in audio, print and electronic media be in accessible format, that persons with disabilities be able to access electronic media through captioning, audio description, sign language interpretation and subtitles, and that electronic goods and equipment meant for everyday use be available in universally accessible form. Section 46 set a two-year deadline for service providers to make their services accessible.

Rights of Persons with Disabilities Rules

The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Rules, 2017 were framed under the Act. Rule 15(1) listed the standards to be followed, among them the Guidelines for Indian Government Websites for websites and the National Policy on Universal Electronic Accessibility for other ICT. The rule was amended in May 2023 by notification G.S.R. 359(E) of the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, which substituted IS 17802 (Parts 1 and 2) as the standard for websites, applications, ICT-based public facilities and services, electronic goods and equipment for everyday use, and other ICT consumer products.

Draft amendment rules of 2026

Following the direction of the Supreme Court in Rajive Raturi, the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment published draft amendment rules as S.O. 3962(E) on 16 July 2026, notified in the Gazette on 20 July 2026. The draft would require every covered establishment to make its websites, applications, ICT hardware and consumer products conform to IS 17802 Part 1, tested by the methods in Part 2, and to publish accessibility conformance reports in both a human-readable format such as accessible HTML or accessible PDF and a machine-readable format such as JSON or XML. Establishments with a turnover above ₹500 crore would have twelve months for initial compliance and smaller establishments eighteen months, with full compliance in two years, while government bodies would have ninety days to revise their procurement policies.

Policy

National Policy on Universal Electronic Accessibility

The National Policy on Universal Electronic Accessibility was approved by the Union Cabinet on 3 October 2013, following a draft consultation paper in 2010. It is the first Indian policy devoted to electronic accessibility. The policy seeks to remove discrimination on the basis of disability in access to electronics and ICT, to promote universal design so that products are usable without adaptation wherever possible, and to support accessible content in Indian languages.

The policy names the then Department of Electronics and Information Technology as the monitoring authority, provides for a high-level advisory committee drawn from government, industry and organisations of persons with disabilities, and calls for accessibility to be included in ICT education, for assistive technology centres to be set up, for research incentives and for government procurement policy to be aligned with accessibility standards. It identifies the World Wide Web Consortium guidelines, namely WCAG 2.0, the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines and the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines, as the standards to be adopted or adapted.

Digital India

Accessibility requirements attach to the Digital India programme through GIGW, which government departments are expected to follow when they build websites, portals and mobile applications, and through the requirement that departments obtain quality certification from the Standardisation Testing and Quality Certification (STQC) Directorate.

Standards

Guidelines for Indian Government Websites

The Guidelines for Indian Government Websites, usually abbreviated GIGW, were laid down by the National Informatics Centre in February 2009 for government websites, portals and applications. The Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances made compliance part of the Central Secretariat Manual of Office Procedure, which gives the guidelines administrative force across the Union government. The guidelines are divided into mandatory, advisory and voluntary categories, and are accompanied by a compliance matrix that departments use to certify conformance.

GIGW 2.0 followed in 2019 after consultation with industry, civil society and government bodies, and added guidance on mobile applications. GIGW 3.0, released in 2023, was prepared by the National Informatics Centre together with the STQC Directorate and the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In). A policy review by the Impact and Policy Research Institute described GIGW 3.0 as setting 88 requirements across four areas: quality, accessibility, cybersecurity and lifecycle management, with the accessibility requirements aligned to WCAG 2.1 Level AA, and noted that it makes screen reader compatibility, high contrast modes and keyboard navigation obligatory.

GIGW 3.0 also covers mobile applications through a component called GuDApps, short for Government User-centric Design for Apps, which grew out of guidelines for the development of e-governance applications issued in 2018. GuDApps addresses integration with shared public digital infrastructure such as DigiLocker, Aadhaar-based identity, single sign-on and open data services. Departments are expected to assess their existing digital assets against GIGW 3.0 and to obtain Certified Quality Website certification from the STQC Directorate as a conformity mark.

The same policy review found that compliance is uneven, and attributed this to legacy systems that cannot be brought into conformance, shortage of resources at the level of local bodies, outdated content management practice and the wider digital divide.

IS 17802

IS 17802, titled Accessibility for ICT Products and Services, is the Indian standard for ICT accessibility, published by the Bureau of Indian Standards. Part 1, Requirements, was published in 2021 and Part 2, Determination of Conformance, in 2022. The standard draws on WCAG, on Section 508 of the United States Rehabilitation Act and on the European standard EN 301 549, and covers text alternatives, keyboard operability, colour contrast, focus management and compatibility with assistive technology.

Unlike GIGW, which applies to government digital assets, IS 17802 applies to websites, applications, ICT-based public facilities and services, and electronic goods and equipment for everyday use, whether supplied by government or by private establishments, since the 2023 amendment to Rule 15.

Government programmes

Accessible India Campaign

The Accessible India Campaign, or Sugamya Bharat Abhiyan, was launched in December 2015 by the Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities. One of its three components is accessibility of information and communication technology, alongside the built environment and transport. Under this component, 95 central government websites were made accessible through the Content Management Framework of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, with a further 500 planned, and 676 state government websites were made accessible, of which 476 had gone live. The department has worked with the National Informatics Centre on training programmes for government officers on web accessibility.

Sugamya Bharat App

The Sugamya Bharat App was launched in 2021 by the Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities. It allows any citizen to report an accessibility barrier in a building, a transport service or an ICT system by uploading a geotagged photograph, which is then routed to the responsible authority. By 25 June 2025 it had 14,358 registered users and 83,791 downloads, and had received 2,705 complaints of which 1,897 had been resolved. A revamped version released in June 2025 added an artificial intelligence chatbot and information on disability support schemes.

Sugamya Pustakalaya

Sugamya Pustakalaya is an online library of accessible books for people with print disabilities, launched on 24 August 2016. It is run by the Daisy Forum of India with support from the Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities, on the Access Infinity platform developed by Tata Consultancy Services, and it draws content from member libraries, from the Accessible Books Consortium global book service and from Bookshare. By September 2019 it offered more than 15,700 titles from registered Indian libraries and 29,000 from the Accessible Books Consortium, alongside access to more than 400,000 Bookshare titles, and had 27,820 registered members across 74 libraries.

Litigation

Rajive Raturi v. Union of India

Main article: Rajive Raturi v. Union of India

Rajive Raturi v. Union of India began as a writ petition filed in 2005 by a blind human rights worker. In a judgment of 8 November 2024 a bench headed by Chief Justice D. Y. Chandrachud held that Rule 15(1) of the 2017 Rules, which covered websites and other ICT among other things, was framed as recommendatory guidelines rather than the mandatory standards that section 40 of the Act requires, and was therefore ultra vires the Act. The court directed the Union Government to frame mandatory, non-negotiable accessibility rules within three months, and observed that accessibility is integral to the right to life under Article 21.

Pragya Prasun v. Union of India

Main article: Pragya Prasun v. Union of India

Pragya Prasun v. Union of India, heard together with Amar Jain v. Union of India, concerned digital know your customer verification. Petitioners who had survived acid attacks could not complete the blink-based liveness check, and a blind lawyer found that KYC applications did not work with screen readers. In a judgment of 30 April 2025, Justices J. B. Pardiwala and R. Mahadevan held that the right to digital access is an intrinsic component of the right to life and liberty under Article 21, described the 2016 Act as a "super-statute", and issued twenty directions to the Union Government and financial and telecom regulators.

Sector regulation

On 14 August 2025 the Reserve Bank of India issued the Reserve Bank of India (Know Your Customer) (2nd Amendment) Directions, 2025, which allow liveness checks that do not depend on visual cues, accept thumb impressions in place of signatures, require regulated entities to designate officers who can override automated rejections for persons with disabilities, and provide for accessibility audits and grievance redressal.

On 31 July 2025 the Securities and Exchange Board of India issued a circular requiring all regulated entities to make their digital platforms conform to WCAG 2.1, IS 17802 and GIGW, to appoint a senior nodal officer for digital accessibility, to commission annual audits by professionals certified by the International Association of Accessibility Professionals, and to carry out usability testing with persons with disabilities.

Research and compliance studies

Academic evaluations have consistently found low levels of conformance. A study of 65 Indian e-government websites published in Universal Access in the Information Society in 2023 found that the majority did not meet even Level A of WCAG 2.1.

The BB100 report, published by the accessibility firm BarrierBreak in partnership with the National Centre for Promotion of Employment for Disabled People, tests the home pages of 100 of India's most visited websites against WCAG 2.2 using automated tools. Its second edition, released on 12 November 2025, found an average of 116 errors per home page. Entertainment sites had the highest error counts and government and healthcare sites the lowest. About 64 per cent of the issues were failures of Level A, the most basic conformance level. The five most frequent problems were colour contrast, unclear link text, keyboard operability, incorrect ARIA markup and missing image descriptions, which together accounted for more than 88 per cent of all issues found.

See also

• Disability in India
• Web accessibility
• Computer accessibility
• Design for All (in ICT)

External links

• Guidelines for Indian Government Websites and apps
• Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities

This article "Digital accessibility in India" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Digital accessibility in India. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

📰 Article(s) of the same category(ies)

• Rajasthan SSO
• Amaze (software)
• Thiruvananthapuram City Police Mobile App
• BrowseAloud
• Ritchie Street
• Hari Vasudev

---