Digital accessibility audit: Indian financial sector found wanting

Persons with disabilities found it difficult to access digital products and services provided by the top 100 companies in financial sector as their homepages were overrun with accessibility errors, says a study by BarrierBreak and National Centre for Promotion of Employment for Disabled People

A research report evaluating the digital accessibility landscape of the top 100 companies in the Indian financial sector including banks, insurance companies, payment gateway providers, investment firms and financial service aggregators, found the room wide open for improvement.

Steered by BarrierBreak and National Centre for Promotion of Employment for Disabled People (NCPEDP), the study sought to assess the readiness of these organisations in providing accessible digital products and services to customers with disabilities.

The home pages of the selected companies were analysed using an automated accessibility tool that tests against WCAG 2.2 - Level AA, followed by manual validation by accessibility experts. The results revealed an average of 91.55 accessibility errors per home page, with the insurance sector having the highest average errors (120.73) and international banks, the lowest (33.4).

The Web Content Accessibility Guideline (WCAG) is a globally recognised technical standard developed by World Wide Consortium to make web content more accessible. It defines how to make web content accessible to people with disabilities. WCAG 2.2 has 13 guidelines organised under four principles namely POUR — perceivable, operable, understandable and robust.

The most common accessibility errors were related to ARIA or Accessible Rich Internet Application (100% of pages), headings (97% of pages), images (96% of pages), colour contrast (91% of pages), and links (90% of pages). The findings serve as a baseline for the adoption of digital accessibility in India’s finance sector and emphasise the need for conscious efforts by organisations to promote financial inclusion and empower people with disabilities, says the report.

In February 2024, the Department of Financial Services, Ministry of Finance notified the Accessibility Standards and Guidelines for banking sector. In August, 2024, the Ministry of Finance issued a notification regarding the accessibility standards and guidelines for infrastructure and services in insurance sector. Later, on October 11, 2024, the Reserve Bank of India issued guidelines for facilitating accessibility to digital payment systems for persons with disabilities.

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