Here’s an uncomfortable number: in the WebAIM Million 2026 analysis, 95.9% of the top one million home pages had detectable WCAG failures — an average of 56 errors per page, and actually up from the year before. Web accessibility isn’t slowly improving. It’s regressing.
For years that was framed as an ethical shortfall. In India, it’s now also a legal one.
What Indian law actually requires
The Rights of Persons with Disabilities (RPwD) Act, through Sections 40–46, requires both public and private entities to provide barrier-free access to digital content — websites, apps, and electronic media. The standards it points to are concrete: IS 17802 and WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Government websites must additionally follow the Guidelines for Indian Government Websites (GIGW). And in 2025, SEBI made digital accessibility mandatory for regulated financial entities — a clear signal of where enforcement is heading.
Why most sites quietly fail
The failures are rarely exotic. They’re the basics, at scale: missing alt text, low-contrast text, unlabelled form fields, links that make no sense out of context, and content that can’t be operated by keyboard. Each is individually small; together they lock real users out and pile up into a compliance exposure.
The audit bottleneck
The honest reason sites stay non-compliant is that thorough manual accessibility audits are slow and expensive — so they get deferred, done once, and never repeated as the site changes. Accessibility isn’t a one-time project; it drifts every time you ship.
Audit fast, in the languages that matter
A11ySutra runs six specialised AI agents over your site to check against WCAG, GIGW 3.0, and Bhashini requirements in seconds, and reports in 22 Indic languages — built specifically for India’s compliance landscape and at a fraction of the cost of a manual audit. That makes accessibility something you can check continuously, not once a year.
Want to know where you stand? book an accessibility audit and we’ll share preliminary findings before you commit.