Accessibility of Indian Government Web Portals with respect to WCAG 2.0 and GIGW Guidelines

Web portals are excellent means to connect with people. Governments in many countries are making innovative use of web portals for effective governance. While doing so one of the major requirements is to make the web portals accessible to all citizens irrespective of their background, physical abilities and age. Accessibility of web portals largely depends on their user-friendliness in terms of design, content, assistive features, and online support. In this work, we have evaluated the accessibility features of fifteen prominent Indian government web portals based on two guidelines, viz., Web Component Accessibility Guideline (WCAG 2.0) and Guidelines for Indian Government Websites (GIGW), while the first one is a standard proposed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the second one is a standard adopted by the Government of India recently. As part of the "Digital India" initiatives, government/semi-government organizations and educational institutions across India have been instructed to redesign their web portals to comply with the accessibility standards at the earliest. Keeping this in view, our work is aimed at finding out deficiencies in some of the frequently used web portals in India with respect to international and national accessibility guidelines. The objective is to help web developers to take care of such deficiencies in web portals so as to meet the expectations of a wide range of user groups.