Disabled-friendly function to feature on all High Courts websites

By LE Staff

New Delhi, June 28, 2021: Websites of all high courts in the country will now have captchas that can be accessed by people with disabilities, the Law Ministry has announced.

“The task of making the digital infrastructure of the Indian judicial system more accessible to persons with disabilities has been a core component of the work of the e-Committee, Supreme Court of India, in the last few months. A significant milestone that the e-Committee’s efforts towards this objective have yielded has been to ensure that all High Court websites now have captchas which are accessible to Persons with Disabilities (PwDs),” the ministry said in a statement on Sunday.

Captcha is a programme that generates and grades textual or pictorial tests that humans can pass but current computer programmes cannot, used to protect websites against spambots.

Currently, court websites use captchas to guard entry points to several essential segments, such as judgments and orders, cause-lists and checking the status of cases. Many high court websites were exclusively using visual captchas that could not be accessed by visually-challenged persons, making it impossible for them to access such content independently.

“In coordination with all the high courts, the e-Committee has now ensured that visual captchas are accompanied by text or audio captchas making the website content accessible to the visually challenged,” the ministry said.

The e-Committee of the Supreme Court, headed by Justice D Y Chandrachud, is also in the process of creating a standard operating procedure (SOP) for generating accessible court documents and will serve as a user guide to its stakeholders. This will address the issues of watermarks, entering content by hand, improper placement of stamps and inaccessible pagination of files, the ministry stated.