Every year, the third Thursday of May is celebrated as Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). This GAAD, India can legitimately cherish the good progress in accessibility that it has achieved in the past 12 months. For one thing, in August last year, the Chief Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities – the principal grievance redressal body for remedying violations of disability rights that is unfortunately little known by the citizenry at large – ordered Practo, an online healthcare service provider, to make its mobile application disabled friendly. Significantly, this was the first of its kind order that required a privately run digital platform to become accessible. Given the ubiquity of inaccessible digital offerings run by the private sector, this provided persons with disabilities an important legal hook to challenge their exclusion from the digital marketplace.
Second, in December, the Supreme Court constituted an Accessibility Committee to make the physical infrastructure and functional processes of the court more disabled-friendly. Third, soon thereafter, in January, the Delhi high court directed Yashraj Films to provide audio descriptions, Hindi subtitling and captioning for the OTT release of the movie Pathaan, in order to make it accessible to persons with hearing and visual impairments. This was followed by an order in April, directing the Union Ministry of Information and Broadcasting to conduct a stakeholder consultation and frame guidelines on accessible media.
Last week, on May 11, the Government of India signed into law two standards released by the Bureau of Indian Standards. These standards cover a whole range of digital offerings: “websites, applications, information and communication technology-based public facilities and services, electronic goods and equipment meant for everyday use for PwDs.” These standards will have to be complied with by all service providers, government and private, within a period of two years.
Representative image. Photo: LCCR/Flickr CC BY NC 2.0
Commendable, but long overdue
Commendable as these developments are, it is important to remember that they are nothing more than the long-overdue vindication of the rights of PwDs. They are but a step in the direction of enabling PwDs to enjoy the rights and freedoms that those who are able-bodied routinely take for granted. While setting up any committee is valuable, much depends on the extent to which it successfully discharges its mandate and how its recommendations are practically operationalised. While ordering one movie or an app to become disabled-friendly has a powerful norm-setting impact, it is merely the tip of the iceberg in terms of attacking the broader problem of an inaccessible Information and Communications Technology (ICT) ecosystem of which Practo and Pathaan are only symptoms.
In light of the above, we set out below our vision for creating a more accessible India that persons with disabilities and their allies should pursue in the next 12 months. First and foremost, it is imperative to ensure that, just as the BIS standards on digital accessibility have been signed into law, the same is done for other sector-specific accessibility standards. These range from police stations and prisons to civil aviation; from higher education institutions to tourism. Given that, as per Rule 15 of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Rules, 2017, this exercise was to be completed by December 2017, it is high time that it is completed on a war footing.
Second, persons with disabilities and their organisations should call out every single inaccessible offering, in a bid to make it more accessible. To be sure, breaking down disability barriers will always be a work in progress. While users with disabilities justifiably feel angry and frustrated that they are shut out from so many everyday activities, it is important not to let those feelings breed a sense of passivity and cynicism. They must be channelled into constructive action. As Armaan Ali, the executive director of the National Centre for Promotion of Employment of Disabled People puts it, we must “collaborate where we can and confront where we must.” More concretely, in the first instance, PwDs should invite the attention of service providers to the fact that their offerings are not disabled-friendly and offer concrete solutions for remedying the given issues. They must also use social media to amp up the pressure, if necessary. When this does not yield the desired result, they must not shirk away from approaching courts to effectively exercise their statutory and constitutional rights.
Third, and relatedly, decision-makers – governments, courts and service providers – must recognise that walking the talk on accessibility requires having to make difficult choices. Accessibility requires conscious and proactive effort, willingness to invest the requisite financial and other resources, the ability to challenge the status quo and to take risks. While taking these measures has extraordinary benefits for the disabled and also benefits the elderly, those with weak literacy levels and the able-bodied, walking the talk is often not easy. Accessibility always entails a cost, but there is no point in claiming to be inclusive if one is unwilling to bear that cost. On this Global Accessibility Awareness Day, let us help creates a society that recognises that even a single day of inaccessibility is one day too many.
Rahul Bajaj is a co-founder of Mission Accessibility, a senior associate fellow at the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy and an attorney at Ira Law. Tanishk Goyal is sensitization and capacity building lead at Mission Accessibility. Views are strictly personal.
