This article is written by Turab Chimthanawala.

Life is not easy for all, but when you have a disability the going becomes even tougher. However, if suitable modifications are made in the physical environment disabled persons  can excel in all spheres and can also outdo other ‘so-called’ normal persons. However, filing of forms on the MCA website which is an integral part of the working of any corporate professional seems to be impossible for visually handicapped persons.

I can say this from my experiences as a CS trainee. Neither of the assisting softwares namely MAGIc, JAWS, NVDA can be used successfully while using MCA forms. If I talk of screen readers like JAWS, it is not possible to navigate through the multiple items of the form  as it does not move from one item to another in sequential order. Luckily in my case since I have partial vision, I can magnify the forms but what about those who have no vision, it is almost impossible for them to fill such forms. In my case, a major hurdle is that keyboard is not supportive and we have to depend on mouse.    Prefill is  another problem where it is difficult to copy the details. Copying from one menu to another is a major problem

Another problem also faced is that there are certain blanks in the form which have to be filled. Now to understand which ones are to be filled manually and which ones are filled automatically  it requires a thorough experience of filling of forms, which is quite impractical due to the multiple forms and specially for a fresher like me. Of course fully-sighted people can take help of the blue colour (depicting manually filled items) and white colour (depicting automatically filled items), but for a partially sighted person like me it is far from easy to differentiate between the light blue colour and the white colour and thus causing me to repeatedly attempt to fill the white blanks to no avail.

One more hurdle I faced is that whilst the entire form gets enlarged, the dialogue boxes which pop up when something inappropriate is entered are in very tiny font.

In a post on Access India mailing list, I read that the Government is forming a committee to look into such websites. I hope some action is taken by the Government at the earliest.

I just pray and hope that the ‘Modi Wave’ which has influenced  virtually every  troubled sector  of the country looks into these matters as well. In fact, it was mentioned by the honourable PM in his ‘Man Ki Baat’ to focus on the welfare of the disabled, I hope that making government websites more accessible for impaired is on his agenda.