India has over 26 million people with visual impairments and 63 million with hearing disabilities, yet the vast majority of Indian websites and applications fail even basic accessibility checks. This is not just an ethical failure — it is a business one. The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act 2016 mandates that all government and government-funded digital services be accessible, and the legal landscape is expanding to cover private enterprises. More importantly, accessible design consistently improves usability for everyone, not just users with disabilities.
Our accessibility practice goes beyond WCAG 2.1 AA compliance checklists. We start every project with an inclusive design audit that considers the full spectrum of Indian user contexts: users on low-vision mode with enlarged text, users navigating entirely via screen readers like NVDA or TalkBack, users with motor impairments using switch controls, and users in bright outdoor conditions where contrast ratios become critical. We test with actual assistive technology users, not just automated tools, because tools catch perhaps 30% of real accessibility barriers.
The technical implementation touches every layer of the stack. Semantic HTML is the foundation — proper heading hierarchy, landmark regions, ARIA labels where native semantics are insufficient, and form inputs with associated labels. For dynamic content, we implement live regions that announce changes to screen readers, focus management that moves keyboard focus to newly rendered content, and skip navigation links that let users bypass repetitive headers. In our React component library, every component ships with keyboard navigation, screen reader announcements, and focus indicators as default behaviours that cannot be accidentally removed.
The most impactful accessibility improvement we have made across projects is not technical — it is typographic. Indian users disproportionately access the web on mobile devices with smaller screens, and the default 16px body text that works fine on a MacBook is genuinely difficult to read on a 5-inch Android screen in direct sunlight. We set our minimum body text to 18px, use a 1.6 line-height for body copy, maintain a minimum touch target of 48x48 pixels, and ensure every interactive element has visible focus states. These choices improve the experience for every user, not just those with disabilities.