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Top1. Introduction
In 1994 Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web and said, "The power of the web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of any disability is an essential aspect". From 1994 till today, the World Wide Web (WWW) has grown tremendously (Johnson & Munford, 2017). It has revolutionized information sharing and methods of telecommuting (Gibson et al., 2002), easing life to a great extent from getting information about anything in the world within seconds to the virtual reality of a location from the desk. Hence, simplifying the tasks by reducing time and travel cost.
The National Portal of India (www.india.gov.in) was introduced by the Indian government for citizens to be updated with government policies, programs, schemes, and services. Unfortunately, this was not accessible by differently-abled people due to a lack of web accessibility tools (Sekharaiah et al., 2011). 2.1% of the Indian population, approximately 21.9 million people experience significant disabilities (Chandramouli, 2011). Hence this emphasizes the importance of improving web-accessibility tools. In this research, three significant disabilities are visually impaired people, hearing or speaking impaired people, and people with Minimal Voluntary Motion (MVM), covering approximately 90% of the differently-abled population (Chandramouli, 2011). Each of these disabilities has been elaborated below.
1.1 Visually Impaired People
According to the global statistics of WHO, there are 285 million with vision impairments, 39 million of whom are visually impaired (Mariotti, 2010). A study reveals that accessing web content was found “frustratingly difficult” for visually impaired people implying a better approach and more advanced techniques are required to help them traverse complex websites.
Visually impaired users can complete tasks like hearing ebooks, news, or any information present on the screen using tools such as screen readers (Verma et al., 2013). In comparison, tasks like filling up forms, important documents, login/signup, banking, etc., are nearly impossible (Buzzi et al., 2011). Thus, it would be difficult for visually impaired users to navigate the government websites and register for any policies or information for their benefit.
1.2 Hearing or Speech Impaired
According to the World Health Organization, 466 million people are deaf or hard of hearing, and 295 million people are speech impaired.
Sign language is the mother tongue for hearing or speech impaired people. Hence it is difficult for them to comprehend spoken languages, mainly due to sentence structure and grammar (Bragg et al., 2019). In the last decade, there has been significant research to solve the following issue by having elementary and clear written language according to WCAG 2.1 (C Spina, 2019), sign language narrating avatars, and human sign instructor videos on the website (Fajardo et al., 2009). Because of high maintenance and ample data storage, these solutions are not feasible. Hence there is a requirement for better web accessibility tools to help them traverse websites.