PremiumIn coordination with all High Courts, the e-Committee has now ensured that visual captchas are accompanied by text/ audio captchas making the website content accessible to the visually challenged, law ministry announced.
Websites of all high courts in the country will now have captchas that can be accessed by people with disabilities, law ministry 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 is headed by Justice D Y Chandrachud.
The e-Committee 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.
"In this regard, the Chairperson of the e-Committee, Dr Justice D Y Chandrachud, has addressed a letter dated 25.06.2021 to the Chief Justices of all the High Courts for their input and suggestions on creating the said SOP," it said.
Another significant initiative undertaken by the e-Committee in collaboration with the NIC is creating a judgment search portal, https://judgments.ecourts.gov.in, that can be easily accessed by people with disabilities.
The portal uses a free text search engine and contains judgments and final orders passed by all high courts.
This portal too will provide the facility of using an audio captcha along with a text captcha, the ministry said. It also uses accessible combo boxes, making it easier for the visually disabled to navigate the website.
There are 25 high courts in the country.
