Government of Madhya Pradesh initiates ICT Accessibility in Public Communication
The Centre for Internet and Society, joined hands with Daisy Forum of India member Arushi in Bhopal to submit a request for a notification mandating that all communication by the Government of Madhya Pradesh should be accessible to persons with disabilities.
Specifically, it was requested that the government ensure that all websites are WCAG 2.0 compliant, that Unicode font is used for all regional language content and that content should be in accessible formats such as Daisy and E-pub. The submission can be found by clicking here.
In January 2013, the Government of Madhya Pradesh issued a notification in Hindi (scanned PDF version of the notification here) requesting all departments to comply with WCAG 2.0 and use Unicode font. The five page notification goes into detail regarding the need for these standards. We welcome this move by the Government of Madhya Pradesh and appreciate the efforts of Arushi in taking up this issue. We are happy to be associated with this initiative.
Click to read the original notification received from the Government of Madhya Pradesh (Image files in Zip folder, size 5.3 MB).
This is really good work. Especially the notification is very much in detail explaining the context of the growing e-environment and the importance of complying with WCAG 2.0. A small suggestion. It will further strengthen the impact of the notification, if we could do a visual explanation of the notification with a 60-90 second video in Hindi and this could be circulated to the concerned and the to the general public. So that the notification message is more strongly communicated to the departments and the bureaucrats. As we all know, often the problem with the govt. notifications is that they are passed on to display boards without putting an effort to read/understand.