Centre for Internet and Society

Report on National Workshop on Web Accessibility

sachia — 2011-08-17T08:50:36Z

This entry contains links to download a report on a workshop on web accessibility organised by CIS for web developers (16-18 February 2009).

The first National Workshop on web accessibility for web developers from different sectors around the country was held at the CSIR premises in Ghaziabad from 16-18February 2009. The workshop was organized by the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Bangalore, and the UN Solution Exchange, and sponsored by NIXI. 29 participants attended the workshop on all the three days.

Please use the relevant links below to read a report on the workshop in the format you prefer.

PDF format: click here to download.

MS Word format: click here to download.

Open Document format: click here to download.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/report-on-national-workshop-on-web-accessibility

Can you read me?

sachia — 2011-04-02T16:11:00Z

Article by Sahana Charan in the Bangalore Mirror, 11 March 2009

Over 90% of govt websites can’t be accessed by people with disabilities; A Bangalore-based social research organisation has now initiated a nation wide campaign to make the web more accessible to them.

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Would it come as a shock to you that more than 90 per cent of government websites, including those dealing with social welfare issues, can be of no use to visually or hearing impaired persons or even some senior citizens? At least, that is what the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) found out when it did a random check on 23 websites of important government organisations. Of the 23 websites that were checked, 21 failed to meet basic standards which could make them accessible to persons with disabilities including those with visual and hearing impairment and motor disabilities.

The study revealed that The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore (IIM-B) websites were the only ones that were designed to meet the needs of all persons including those with disabilities.

When Nirmitha Narasimhan, Programme Manager at CIS, who is visually-impaired herself, ran an automated tool over these websites, she found that most of them failed to meet basic standards. “We carried out accessibility testing on the homepages of 23 sites using an automated tool and of these 21 failed automated verification and only the RBI and IIM-B websites passed verification on the basis of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Priority 1 checkpoints. But even these websites had some problems. Overall the sites that failed the fewest tests were RBI, IIM-B, RTI and CMC Vellore,” she said.

Access for All

Considering that some of the websites that failed the accessibility test were important for all citizens, including the Railways, Lok Sabha, Rajya Sabha, RTI and National Informatics Centre (NIC) websites, the research organisation decided to take this exercise forward by launching a national campaign for electronic accessibility. Their campaign has been so successful that they are now in talks with the central government to formulate a draft policy on electronic accessibility.

“Persons who have disabilities such as blindness or low vision, deafness, cognitive impairment and so on are unable to browse through websites like other persons, since they are unable to see graphics, flash presentations, hear audio clips etc. They use technologies such as screen readers (like Jaws and NVDA which read out whatever appears on the screen for a blind user) or other kinds of devices to perform the functionalities associated with using the computers. For deaf persons, it is necessary to have captioning for an audio clip to tell them what is being played,” says Nirmitha. But she adds that even for assistive technologies to be used, the websites need to have built-in features that will make them accessible to everyone.

Guidelines

“Most websites have features such as graphics which cannot be interpreted by technologies such as screen readers. In such a case, the website creator has to take care to give alternative texts which describe what the graphic is about. For instance, under a picture of a dog on a website, there should also be a line describing the picture,” adds Nirmitha, who is now working with web developers across the country to create awareness about guidelines for creating a website.

The World Wide Web Consortium (www) has come out with guidelines on how to build websites which are accessible to persons using assistive technologies. These guidelines are called the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and address the needs of all disabilities and inabilities. “In the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany and many other countries, it is mandatory to implement these guidelines for all websites. Since ours is an internet-savvy nation, it is high time these rules were made mandatory here,” says Nirmitha.

CIS has conducted a series of workshops for web developers from organisations including NIC, JNU and many voluntary agencies so that they could incorporate WCAG. In Karnataka, all government websites are designed by NIC, so it goes without saying that none of them are disabled-friendly.

Their Own Site Too

Karnataka has over 9.4 lakh persons with disabilities of whom at least 10-15 per cent are able to use assistive technology and can access the net. In Bangalore city alone, close to one lakh persons are disabled and quite a few of them have knowledge of computers.

But it is a pity that the website of the Directorate for the Welfare of the Disabled and Senior Citizens cannot be accessed by people who need to use it the most.

Forget being disabled-friendly, the website has not been updated since 2007 and the gallery section still shows pictures of former chief minister H D Kumaraswamy.

What the guidelines say

For sites which have graphics, alternative text should be given at the bottom describing the graphic for the benefit of visually impaired persons.

For the hearing impaired, video clips should be accompanied by text running at the bottom of the clip so that they will know what is being said.
Flickering text that cannot be deciphered by a screen reader (a technology used by the visually impaired that reads out test on the computer screen aloud) should be avoided.
For those with motor impairment, options can be given to avoid the use of mouse and where only one single key could be used.

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To read the article at the Bangalore Mirror website, click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/can-you-read-me

Scholarly Communication in the Age of the Commons

sachia — 2011-04-05T04:37:37Z

One-day conference on Open Access Organised by National Aerospace Laboratories (as a part of their Golden Jubilee celebrations), Indian Academy of Sciences and Centre for Internet and Society

Background

Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. OA removes price barriers (subscriptions, licensing fees, pay-per-view fees) and permission barriers (most copyright and licensing restrictions) and ensures free availability and unrestricted use.

In today’s knowledge-based society, the advent of the Internet and widespread and easy access to scientific information are facilitating research and innovation. Open Access is not only changing the nature of scholarly communication but even the way research is carried out. Indeed Open Access is the bedrock on which the emerging Global Research Library initiative is being built.

Scientists and scientific institutions in India - some of them, to be precise - have moved up in the value chain in that they access information and disseminate their findings often through barrier-free electronic channels. Out of about 3,900 open access journals, India accounts for 108 titles as seen from the Directory of Open Access Journals. The major Indian publishers of OA journals are Indian Academy of Sciences, Indian National Science Academy, MedKnow Publications and National Informatics Centre. According to the Registry of Open Access Repositories there are 40 open access repositories in India including those at Indian Institute of Science, National Aerospace Laboratories, National Institute of Oceanography, Raman Research Institute, National Institute of Technology - Rourkela, and Indian Institutes of Technology. Prof. Samir Brahmachari, Director General of CSIR, has initiated the Open Source Drug Discovery programme as an alternative to the traditional patent-driven model of drug research. Recently CSIR has adopted an open access policy. Indian National Science Academy is one of the early signatories to the Berlin Declaration.

Thus Open Access - both for accessing worldwide information and for making our own research more visible - is not new to India. But one must admit that considering the size of India's research and higher education enterprise what we have achieved so far is utterly inadequate and incommensurate with our ambition to become a knowledge power. We have a long way to go. And the first step is to adopt open access nationwide.

This one-day “Conference on Scholarly Communication in India in the Age of the Commons” is organized to take stock of the current developments in Open Access and to highlight the issues that would need to be addressed to enable a wider access to scientific knowledge and to enhance the visibility of research performed in India.

Date and Time

26 March 2009; 9.30 am - 5.00 pm

Venue

S R Valluri Auditorium, National Aerospace Laboratories, (Old) Airport Road, Bangalore

Speakers

Speakers at the event include:

Prof Leslie Chan, University of Toronto and Bioline International http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~chan/

Prof John Willinsky, Stanford University and Public Knowledge Project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Willinsky

Please see the programme below for names of the other speakers.

Contact

Dr I R N Goudar

Scientist ‘G’ and Head, ICAST

National Aerospace Laboratories

Airport Road, Bangalore-560017

Telephone: (+91) 80 2508 6080

Fax: (+91) 80 2526 0862

Email: goudar@nal.res.in

While you can register on the spot, we encourage you to kindly register through e-mail. Please provide name, designation, address, contact telephone number and e-mail address. Participants may make their own arrangements for travel and accommodation.

Programme

9.30 am-10.15 am -- Inaugural session

Welcome by Dr I R N Goudar

About the conference: Prof Subbiah Arunachalam

Talk by Prof D Balasubramanian

Remarks by Dr A R Upadhya

10.15 am-10.45 am -- Tea

10.45 am-11.35 am -- Prof Leslie Chan, University of Toronto and Bioline International

11.35 am-12.25 pm -- Prof John Willinsky, Stanford University and Public Knowledge Project

12.25 pm-1.15 pm -- Dr D K Sahu, MedKnow Publications

1.15 pm-2.15 pm -- Lunch

2.15 pm-2.45 pm -- Mr Sunil Abraham, Centre for Internet and Society

2.45 pm-4.15 pm -- Panel discussion

Moderator: Prof P Balaram

Panelists: Subbiah Arunachalam, Leslie Chan, N V Sathyanarayana, A R Upadhya, and John Willinsky

4.15 pm -- Tea

VIDEOS

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/scholarly-communication-in-the-age-of-the-commons

Getting the net out of its web

sachia — 2011-04-02T16:11:22Z

Article by Malvika Tegta in Daily News and Analysis (DNA), 8 March 2009

Artists, academicians, tech heads and lawyers have come together to give the country a voice in technology, study, polity and discourse, says Malvika Tegta

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The Internet has changed lives in ways we haven't stopped to grasp — the real feeding into the virtual and the other way round. Also, how the Internet interacts with individuals varies across cultures and societies. Narratives on the medium originating in the West cannot size up the complexities of the developing world. In the absence of a voice from the "global south" in affecting the direction of the Internet, technologies continue to be designed for a certain kind of end user, with underlying assumptions. "That apart, as the Internet grows, it doesn't necessarily always grow for the better, with things like cyber terrorism, cyber bullying, pornography, identity theft, gambling, internet addiction, being the by-products of the information revolution," says Nishant Shah, director-research and one of the brains behind the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), initiated in August 2008, set up to take note of what we passively allow to direct our lives.

These are the issues that led Gibraltar-based Anurag Dikshit, co-founder of PartyGaming, parent company of online poker site PartyPoker.com, to think that "the time had come for India to have a voice in technology study, polity and discourse, as we quickly find ourselves becoming an Information Society". He, along with Alternative Law Forum's legal theorist Lawrence Liang, Shah and Sunil Abraham, brought CIS into being, pooling in the finest minds from the field of arts, academia, law and technology. CIS, since, has set out to produce local and contextual histories of the Internet to make voices "emerging out of Asia more visible in international dialogues around technology".

Their approach: research, awareness and advocacy. Their goal: to make sense of how the Internet is changing the world around us, with India at the heart.

CIS looks at, among other things, the way copyrights, closed standards and an absence of public policy in certain areas have affected access, innovation and kept the Internet from being less democratic and vibrant. "Copyright law is kind of a monolithic thing, like a 'one size fits all' kind of solution for encouraging creativity. It doesn't really work especially when you look at an equitable system of access," says programme manager Pranesh Prakash. He adds: "Copyright proves to be a huge barrier to promotion of accessibility, and in the Indian context needs some kind of relaxation." Programme manager at CIS, Nirmita puts this in perspective, in the particular case of internet access for the visually impaired and those with cognitive disabilities. "A blind person cannot read the written word, so you record an audio cassette or you have an e-version of it and a screen reader reads it for you. That inverts the conversion of a format, which is not permitted legally under the copyright law in India. Every time you want to convert it, you need to take permission of the copyright holder. So what that is essentially doing is depriving you of your right to read," she says. "Our country should have a law that is universal. We have signed United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities that says that everything on the Internet should be in accessible formats, but it's not binding and we don't have a law on it."

In the area of science and academics, copyrights pose another challenge, that of impeding innovation by keeping from the taxpayer, results of at least the research that is funded by tax a notion CIS has been pushing for. "Scientific literature is propounded on the principles like everyone is allowed to review it and that knowledge spreads to a number of people," says Prakash. Both the scientist and the reader want that. But what we see today is that a few publishers control most of all scientific literary output, so most of it is not accessible because a month's subscription sometimes amounts to the entire library budget of an institution. That is especially a big problem for developing countries.

By the end of this year, CIS hopes that individual institutions take up open access policy. "It may not always have to be a top down approach," he says.

In the realm of governance, CIS identifies use of closed standards software as not only unwise strategy, but also socially and ethically a bad decision, and is looking at policy change in the area. Explains Sunil Abraham, director-policy, in his paper: "If I were to store data, information or knowledge in .doc, .xls or .ppt format, my ability to read my own files expires the moment the licence for my copy of Microsoft Office expires." He adds that governments have a responsibility to use open standards, especially for interactions with the public and where the data handled has a direct impact on democratic values. "In developing countries, governments have greater responsibility because most often they account for over 50% of the revenues of proprietary software vendors," he writes.

They are also exploring bridging digital divides without ignoring the "complex interplay, in the case of India for instance, of caste, language, affordability, education, literacy, and in some cases, even religion" and how the Internet is changing the landscape of higher education in India.
As Shah puts it: "Internet technologies are now becoming tools that we think with. We cannot write without the cursor blinking on an empty screen, we cannot talk in public without the aid of a digital presentation..."

It's about time, then, that we thought about the one thing that's becoming one of the bigger movers in our lives and build a discourse around it.

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To read the article in DNA's e-paper, click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/getting-the-net-out-of-its-web

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sachia — 2009-03-02T06:26:52Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/uploads/vhg4.jpg

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sachia — 2009-03-02T06:25:48Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/uploads/vhg3.jpg

Report from DigiActive’s Bangalore Meet-up

sachia — 2011-08-20T22:28:34Z

A blog entry by Mary Joyce on the meet-up hosted at CIS, Bangalore

We had a great meet-up yesterday at the offices of the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore (thanks so much to Sunil, Pranesh, Sanchia, and Deepika for making it possible!) It was a very diverse group, with participants from Indian and international NGOs, techies from Yahoo!, and even a radio producer and film-maker.

We started out by dissecting this Pink Chaddis campaign, a very popular women’s rights campaign organized through Facebook that had just organized a big action on Valentines’ Day. (I’ll be posting on the campaign a little later - it’s a great one.)

However, when we went about creating a definition for digital activism, the discussion became more theoretical. Although DigiActive is optimistic about the possibility of digital tools to empower those fighting injustice, this meet-up group decided that digital activism was value neutral and that it simply mapped onto the existing goals and motives within a society. It is a technique that can be used for constructive or destructive ends.

At the end of the event, some participants came up to me to make sure my feelings weren’t hurt by the disagreement, but I assured them I was really happy with the result. Only if digital activism is debated and dissected will we be able to understand and use it well.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/event-blogs/report-from-digiactive2019s-bangalore-meet-up

Bloggers battle India's supreme court over prosecution for internet threats

sachia — 2011-04-02T16:17:48Z

Article by Randeep Ramesh in the Guardian, 26 February 2009

India's supreme court is facing the wrath of the country's bloggers over the prosecution of a student because of anonymous comments published on a social networking group he created.

The computer science student, named as Ajith D, was arrested over allegations that death threats had been posted on his "anti-Shiv Sena" group on Google's networking site, Orkut. The 20-year-old also faces charges of criminal intimidation and hurting religious sentiments.

The Shiv Sena (Army of Shiv) is a political party that made its name in the 1990s for populist policies that were anti-Muslim and favoured locals over outsiders. Its leader, Bal Thackeray, has been quoted as admiring Hitler.

Mumbai police had been monitoring the site since the Sena staged violent protests against Orkut for carrying anti-party statements, vandalising cybercafes across Mumbai. Officers contacted federal authorities in Delhi before bringing charges.

In response, the lawyer representing the student asked the supreme court to quash the case, saying his client had published nothing provocative. However India's chief justice, KG Balakrishnan, refused the application saying: "We will not do that. Anything that is posted on the internet goes to the public. The internet is open to the world."

The case highlights how India, the world's largest democracy, deals with the thorny issue of freedom of speech on the internet. A law about to arrive on the statute books places the onus for publishing material on the web, not on hosts of the material, such as Google's Orkut service, but on individuals who create blogs and websites.

"The difficulty here is that my client did not make the threats. He simply set up a community group and left it unmoderated," Jogy Scaria, Ajith's lawyer, said. "He only created the anti-Shiv Sena site."

Orkut is one of India's most popular social networking sites and many bloggers vented their fury online. "I am not able to gather how it is possible that bloggers can be hit with libel and criminal suits on the basis of anonymous postings on their websites," wrote one on Ekawaaz-One Voice.

Lawrence Liang, India's foremost authority on freedom of speech on the internet, wrote about the case on Kafila.org.

"When organisations like the Shiv Sena start using defamation laws, it smacks of chutzpah to me … What other way can we describe the bizarre situation of the violence-prone macho men, who suddenly run around screaming about the violation of their legal rights and the slurring of their reputation?"

India's constitution guarantees freedom of expression as long as this does not extend to libel, national security, contempt and a broad category of public morality – which includes "hurting religious sentiments".

Pranesh Prakash of Bangalore's Centre for Internet and Society, a thinktank specialising in web civil rights, said the internet had allowed "everyone to become a publisher but not the awareness of what responsibilities of a publisher. The way the law is dealing with it is highly problematic."

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To read the article at the Guardian website, click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/bloggers-battle-indias-supreme-court-over-prosecution-for-internet-threats

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sachia — 2009-02-23T11:41:36Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/uploads/vhg2.jpg

vhg1

sachia — 2009-02-23T11:40:33Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/uploads/vhg1.jpg

Art and Science from the Tiniverse--An Artist's Perspective on Nanotechnology

sachia — 2011-04-05T04:39:51Z

Talk by Julie Freeman

The Centre for Internet and Society invites you to a talk by Julie Freeman, Wellcome Trust Artist in Residence at the Microsystems and Nanotechnology Centre, Cranfield University.

Abstract

How many people know that, on a fairly prosaic level, nanoparticles are already in everyday use, enhancing the functionality of (for example) sun creams and sticking plasters? In tandem, rumours abound in the media of much more revolutionary advances, such as tiny machines that can zip around our bloodstream killing viruses, but these are still far from being realised. So what is nanotechnology about, and why do we need to know about it?

Sharing a desire to convey scientific information in a non-traditional and non-scientific way, Julie Freeman, artist, has collaborated with Jeremy Ramsden, Professor of Nanotechnology, to develop creative works to advance the understanding of fundamental processes, issues and techniques within and surrounding nanotechnology. The artist’s fascination with biology and technology has steered her toward his subject, where these worlds seem to collide.

In this talk Freeman will discuss her experiences of working with scientists in the nanotechnology world, how science and it's methodologies impact her artwork and will display the Nano Novels – sets of stereo literature and imagery – which help to contextualise nanotechnology.

Speaker

Julie Freeman's work spans visual, audio and digital art forms and explores the relationship between science, nature and how humans interact with it. For the past 12 years her work has focused on using electronic technologies to ‘translate nature’ – whether it is through the sound of torrential rain dripping on a giant rhubarb leaf; a pair of mobile concrete speakers who lurk in galleries haranguing passersby with fractured sonic samples or by providing an interactive platform from which to view the flap, twitch and prick of dogs’ ears.

In 2005 she launched her most known digital artwork The Lake, which used hydrophones, custom software and advanced technology to track electronically tagged fish and translate their movement into an audio-visual experience. The work was developed over three years and supported by Tingrith Coarse Fishery and a two year fellowship from NESTA (The National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts).

She is currently artist-in-residence at the Microsystems and Nanotechnology Centre at Cranfield University where she is creating works that aim to increase public understanding of self-assembly and organising processes at the nanoscale and their potential social impacts and consequences.

Julie is a graduate of the MA in Digital Arts at the Centre for Electronic Arts, Middlesex University, London, and Steering Group Chair of FreqOUT! an innovative London based community arts programme, enabling young people to work with wireless technologies.

Time and Date

Monday, 9 March, 2009; 4.00-5.30 pm

Venue

Centre for Internet and Society, No. D2, 3rd Floor, Sheriff Chambers, 14, Cunningham Road, Bangalore - 560052

Map

For a map, please click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/art-and-science-from-the-tiniverse-an-artists-perspective-on-nanotechnology

DigiActive Meetup

sachia — 2011-04-05T04:40:21Z

Chilling for Digital Activism--Meeting with Mary Joyce

Are you interested in using the Internet and mobile phones as part of a campaign for political and social change? Do you have a story to share about your own experience using these tools? CIS invites you to an informal interaction with Mary Joyce, co-founder of DigiActive.org, an organization dedicated to promoting digital activism around the world.

Mary Joyce is the co-founder of DigiActive.org, was also New Media Operations Manager for Barack Obama's presidential campaign, and has been a master's student at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and a Research Assistant for the Internet and Democracy Project at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Mary also works as a consultant in the field of technology and social change.

Time and Date

Thursday, 26 February, 2009; 4.00-5.30 pm

Venue

Centre for Internet and Society, No. D2, 3rd Floor, Sheriff Chambers, 14, Cunningham Road, Bangalore - 560052

Map

For a map, please click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/technology-for-activism

Meeting for FOSS Advocacy Coalition

sachia — 2009-02-18T13:33:05Z

A half-day meeting to discuss a FOSS advocacy coalition and items for immediate action

The Centre for Internet and Society, on behalf of Anivar Aravind, Gurumurthy K, Renuka Prasad, Sunil Abraham, and Vinay Sreenivasa, invites you to a half-day meeting to discuss a FOSS advocacy coalition and items for immediate action by such a coalition.

Many of us have been advocating for several years the adoption of FOSS applications and platforms, and FOSS related advocacy has been gathering momentum. Last year, we had advocacy processes relating to software patents and the OOXML debate, apart from RMS and Eben Moglen visiting various places in India sharing their views on FOSS.

Yet we do have a long way to go before FOSS is widely used in India. We believe that bringing together different groups of actors (who believe in the principles of Free Software), including academic institutions, NGOs and CBOs, research and advocacy groups, professional associations, and FOSS enterprises providing services in different areas as development, training, support and maintenance, will help in supporting and cohering a positive discourse in favour of FOSS.

Some of us feel that a loose national coalition of such individuals/organisations and associations should be formed to work towards the widespread adoption and promotion of FOSS. Such a network of organisations working along a broad consensus on promoting FOSS will provide stronger and more effective responses to events relating to FOSS and initiate more proactive actions than individuals or institutions acting in isolation.

Agenda

The proposed agenda for the meeting is a discussion as follows:

Formation of a national coalition of organisations advocating for FOSS

The goals, scope, priorities, approaches, structures, issues/risks, alternatives, resources for such a coalition, name of the coalition, etc, will be discussed.

Working with government departments and public sector units advocating them to adopt and promote FOSS

When we speak individually to any of our contacts/departments in the government, the impact may not be significant. However, if we send collective representations to departments such as the e-Governance, IT, Education, and RDPR departments, and seek meetings to explain the issue and the advantages of FOSS, it would help and motivate them to look at the issue in depth.

FOSS initiatives in the country, including the Gujarat ICT in schools program

Many state governments across India are in different stages of adoptiong FOSS, and we can share our understanding and views on the current situation. The Gujarat government, for instance, is implementing a 500-crore ICT plan in school education program but have not yet taken a final decision on whether to use FOSS. There are also plans for a FOSS workshop in Delhi, to which different groups, including political parties and government officials could be exposed to discussions of the advantages of adopting and promoting FOSS.

FOSS initiatives in Karnataka

There are also some initiatives in Karnataka for which we can work together to help in the adoption of FOSS. We have an informal request for a proposal for a pilot project to train government staff and vendor staff in Bangalore on the GNU/Linux platform that has been chosen for the ICT in schools program. We also need to work on the issue of using Nudi on FOSS. A serious impediment to getting the government to use FOSS is that Nudi works only on MS Windows and not on FOSS distributions. Lastly, we should explore what could be done to help VTU adopt FOSS over proprietary technologies. Engineering colleges adopting FOSS will have a significant impact on the creation of the FOSS ecosystem in the state.

We can also discuss other means and methods for the promotion of FOSS.

Please email in your suggestions and ideas on the agenda for the meeting. If you are interested in participating in the coalition, but are unable to attend the meeting, please do let us know.

Date and Time

Sunday, 22 February, 2009; 3.00-6.00 pm

Venue

Centre for Internet and Society, No. D2, 3rd Floor, Sheriff Chambers, 14, Cunningham Road, Bangalore - 560052

Map

For a map, please click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/meeting-for-foss-advocacy-coalition

The Internet and Illusions of Space and Liberty

sachia — 2011-04-05T04:40:05Z

Talk by Kiran Sahi

The Centre for Internet and Society invites you to a talk by Kiran Sahi on 'The Internet and Illusions of Space and Liberty'. Kiran will use this talk as an opportunity to look at the parallels that can be drawn between the spatial elements of the mind, corporal physical space, and the virtual domains of the internet. Reflecting on the roles of these parallel domains, we can discuss how dissident elements within society, traditionally found in geographical wildernesses, have found new opportunities for freedom in the realms of the internet. The talk will also explore the idea of the internet as a heterotopia, a safe space for displaced realities, and the pressures which make it adopt a panoptic structure.

Speaker

Kiran Sahi is is a designer and educator working from his home in a village north of Bangalore. His work involves presenting and interpreting the changing socio-political geography of his locality for teachers and students visiting from international academic institutions and education authorities. He also advises on local education development projects. Kiran works as a consultant design faculty, teaching materials and sculptural design, and runs a ceramic studio that produces large scale ceramic murals for public spaces. His previous work has involved exploring cultural narratives and their visual representations. He has been interested in exploring the possibilities of a collaborative community based business involving professional designers and local craftsmen.

Time and Date

Saturday, 7 March, 2009; 5.00-6.30 pm

Venue

Centre for Internet and Society, No. D2, 3rd Floor, Sheriff Chambers, 14, Cunningham Road, Bangalore - 560052

Map

For a map, please click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/the-internet-and-illusions-of-space-and-liberty

Accessible websites could become a reality

sachia — 2011-04-02T16:17:26Z

Article by L. Subramani in the Deccan Herald, 11 February 2009

Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), a Bangalore-based NGO that researches on Internet's influence on families and individuals, had reported that about 99 per cent of government websites have failed in meeting with the accessibility guidelines issued by W3C (World Wide Web Consortium).

As Kanchan Pamnani speaks about web accessibility, she relates to us an old story learnt at school. A crane called his long-time friend, a wolf, for dinner and showed a tall, narrow jar that had delicious fishes in it. Unable to put its head inside and eat, the bewildered wolf returned home hungry, as the crane enjoyed putting its long beak inside the jar and tasted its content.

“What’s the point in information being available on the Internet? The visually challenged can’t access the content all the same, since the design and presentation of websites are not friendly to the screen reader software they use to access them through PC and laptops. And they need this the most, since it saves their time and energy when they get things done online,” Ms Pamnani said.

Despite being home to the world’s largest visually impaired population, the problem of inaccessible websites has been common in India. What hurts Ms Pamnani, a visually challenged lawyer and folks like her is the irony that several website developers in India comply with accessibility norms while creating websites for their foreign clients for fear of their product getting rejected and ignore the same while making sites for home-based organisations.

Some months ago, Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), a Bangalore-based NGO that researches on Internet's influence on families and individuals, had reported that about 99 per cent of government websites have failed in meeting with the accessibility guidelines issued by W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). It had highlighted CMC Velore, RBI and IIMB as some of the institutions whose websites are either too difficult or impossible for persons with visual impairment to access with their special screen reading software.

“Someone has to take responsibility for this situation,” Pamnani mentioned. “Given that people from the IT community have created these websites, they will have to take the blame.”

Screen readers, which the blind use to get content of a computer in voice, comprises of text to speech engine (a sort of virtual larynx) and the software that allows users to interface with the system. However, graphically rich webpages or features that are primarily visual in nature become a potential minefield to the screen reader since it doesn’t know how that information can be rendered “readable” to the TTS engine.

Mindful of this bottleneck, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which play the role of rule-makers in the way the web functions, designed a set of guidelines web developers must use while creating websites. For instance, it calls for giving heading levels which makes screen reader users to press “Shift and the number key depending on which heading level (one to five) they want to reach” and straight away go to the heading instead of going line by line.

For webpages to be fully accessible, the guidelines ask developers to use HTML tags and create alternative, verbally described pages (to the graphically rich ones) that can be read by screen readers. Probably fearing the labour it takes, developers of websites are alleged to be overlooking the guidelines and disability activists say that the negligence is proving to be too costly for them.

“These days, most of the government documents are available on the Internet,” said Javed Abidi, Chairman, National Centre for Promotion of Employment for Disabled Persons (NCPEDP). “The technology is available and there is also the necessary awareness, but web developers seem to be taking this issue too lightly.”

Abidi and Pamnani have been talking about the situation with NASSCOM and were close to hosting a Dharna in front of the venue where the industry body was hosting its leadership summit on Wednesady. However, the protest was called off since NASSCOM agreed to focus on the issue.

“As a first step, the body has agreed to make their own website accessible,” Abidi, the New Delhi-based, wheelchair-bound disability activist, said. “Then they have agreed to urge their members to follow suit. Also, despite their attempts to take up accessibility as a CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) issue, we want them to consider this as a rights issue, since the United Nations Convention for Rights of Persons With Disability (UNCRPD), which India has signed and ratified, states (in article 9) that access to information is a right.”

So Pamnani and several other visually challenged users of the Internet feel the day when they can log on to the website of an online store and purchase anything of their choice isn’t far away.

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To read the article at the Deccan Herald website, click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/accessible-websites-could-become-a-reality