W3C India Workshop

On

“Web Accessibility Initiative in India:

Technology, Standards and
Implementation”
Organized by W3C India in close co-ordination with Yahoo! R & D, India

11th December, 2010

Bangalore, India
 Introduction

Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can use the Web. More specifically, Web
accessibility means that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact
with the Web, and that they can contribute to the Web .
In India , approximately 2.0 crore population [Ref Census 2001] suffers from various kinds of
disabilities and the challenge lies in providing citizen centric web based services to these section
of society for more inclusive growth. The complexity of Indian scenario is augmented manifold,
as India has 22 constitutionally recognized languages and we need to develop solutions in all
these languages. .
The World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has taken a pioneering role in development of
standards and guidelines for development of tools, technologies and web interface accessible
for persons with disabilities. The Web Content accessibility guideline [WCAG 2.0] is the key
achievement in this direction. In India, though few initiatives have been undertaken towards
development and deployment of assistive technologies, still lot more needs to be done in terms
of affordable multilingual assistive technology development, adoption of standards, awareness
and education, implementation and policy level aspects to provide web based accessible
solutions to include these specially-abled citizens towards nation building.

Objectives
 This Workshop would provide the technology developers, web service and solution
providers, Policy makers, NGOs and users a unique platform for understanding the common
needs and implementation issues.

 The special focus of workshop will be on multilingual requirements in web accessibility area.

 Capturing the requirements for Indian languages as per W3C WCAG 2.0 Standards
 Agenda

10.00-11.00am Inaugural Session

1. Welcome Address Swaran Lata , W3C India

2. Inaugural Keynote Shouvick Mukherjee,Yahoo!

3. Expert Keynote Address Victor Tsaran, Yahoo !

11.00-11.15am Tea Break
11.15-1.15pm Session 1:W3C and Web accessibility Initiative
Shilpi Kapoor ,Barrier Break
4. Overview of WAI,WCAG 2.0 and Adoption
Technologies

5. WAI-ARIA Victor Tsaran, Yahoo !

6. Challenges Multilingual web Access Swaran lata , W3C India

7. Multimodal Interface Shreekanth,C-DAC,Bangalore

8. Indianizing Web Content Accessibility Dr. T V Gopal , Anna University

1.15-2.15pm Lunch Break
2.15-3.15pm Session 2: Emerging Technology and web accessibility Implication
A G Ramakrishnan, IISc
9. Language Technology to Enable Accessibility
Bangalore
Mamta Tandel, BarrierBreak
10. Creating Accessible PDFs
Technologies
Vivek Gaikwad,Cognizant
11. Flash Accessibility For all
Technologies
3:15-3:30pm Tea Break
3.30-4:15 pm Session3:Business and Strategic perspective of Web Accessibility
12. Talk By Wipro kenny kesar

13. Spoken Web , IBM Anupam Jain

4:15-5:00pm Session 4 : Technology Development for Multilingual Accessibility in India

Ram Ramachandran, Nuance
14. TTS for visually challenged in Indian Languages
India

15. Talk By Microsoft Kalika Bali

5.00-5.30pm Summary & Recommendations

 Workshop Venue
The workshop held at Yahoo ! R & D Centre, Bagmane Tridib,
Block 'A',
Bagmane Tech Park, C.V. Raman Nagar,
Bangalore - 560093

Welcome Address
Ms. Swaran Lata, Country Manager W3C India gave away the
welcome address. She gave the brief introduction on W3C India
Office activities and Web Accessibility.

Inaugural Keynote
Mr. Shouvick Mukherjee, Vice-president & CEO ,Yahoo! R& D
started with inaugural address and welcomed all the speakers as
well as the delegates in the workshop. He Talked about the
activities carried out by Yahoo! India in the field of Accessibility.

Expert Keynote Address

Victor Tsaran, Sr. Accessibility Program Manager, Yahoo! was
expert keynote speaker of the workshop. He told about the
importance of Web Accessibility for disable persons in India.

Coordinator
The workshop was excellently coordinated by Mr. Srinivasu
Chakravarthula, Accessibility Manager, Yahoo! India.
 Major Participation from Industries

10
9

2 2 2
1
 Testimonials

“The event was quite good with good “The presentation was good
speakers with different sessions and showcasing the history of W3C and the
with very good concepts.” present scenario.”

By shushi Dhara By Anupriya Gupta

Servolet InfoTech Infosys

“This session is very useful for me “. It is globalized, and it is very useful

.Specially to the WAI-ARIA is excellent for me. I feel lucky to attend the
and the guidelines for Indian programme which is going to change
Government is good and the hole my life style.”
session is very useful for me.”
By vinoth dayaraj
By logesh Ravi chandran
Nebcors Institute of Management
NEB cons.

“Good enough .Some part of the “Many thanks for the well organized
session was very useful.” W3C India Workshop at Bangalore. It
has been good learning for me.”
By Shalini
By Gopal T V
Servolet InfoTech
Anna University
 Session Summary

Session 1:
W3C and Web accessibility Initiative

Adoption of W3C WCAG 2.0

By Shilpi Kapoor, Managing Director, Barrier Break Technologies

W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 covers a wide range of
recommendations for making Web content more accessible. As compared to WCAG 1.0, WCAG
2.0 is a more comprehensive list of guidelines that has considerations for both backward and
future technologies.
she discussed about the adoption of WCAG 2.0 and the adaption of the same into the Indian
Context. The gaps and problems that exist that need to be addressed ,so that WCAG 2.0 can be
implemented effectively in the Indian Scenario. The presentation has covered testing and the
importance of testing with people with disabilities to ensure that the websites are compliant.

WAI-ARIA
by Victor Tsaran , Sr. Accessibility Program Manager, Yahoo!

He talked about the WAI-ARIA, the Accessible Rich Internet Applications Suite, defines a way to
make Web content and Web applications more accessible to people with disabilities. It
especially helps with dynamic content and advanced user interface controls developed with
Ajax, HTML, JavaScript, and related technologies. WAI-ARIA addresses these accessibility
challenges, for example, by defining new ways for functionality to be provided to assistive
technology. With WAI-ARIA, developers can make advanced Web applications accessible and
usable to people with disabilities.
 Challenges Multilingual Web Access
By Ms. Swaran Lata, Country Manger, W3C India

She talked about the importance of web accessibility in India and the targeted peoples who will
get benefitted by this initiative. .
She discussed about the use of web accessibility in India and challenges associated with respect
to Indian languages. As multilingual web is an approach towards making web more accessible by
everyone and especially in the context of its accessibility in all 22 national recognized language
of India.

Indianizing Web Content Accessibility

Dr. T V Gopal, Professor, College of Engineering Anna University

His presentation has focused on the following three points of the W3C : Universal Access – Voice
Browser, Semantic Web – Taking Advantage of the Relationships amongst Indian Languages. The
author has practical experience in the Indo-Aryan Family of Languages derived from Sanskrit.
This approach is also good for Internationalization. Trust.
A Voice Browser based on “Psychoacoustics” that explores the interrelationships amongst
language, speech, cognition and occultism [music & mantra] is mooted. Sanskrit Etymology
based on the notions of “Bija” with Voice Browsers can result in remarkable improvements in
the accessibility across multiple-language sites. It paves way for language independence.
Pronunciation based on the “Siksha and Formal Musical Swaras” fosters Trust.
 Multimodal Interface
N S Sreekanth , C-DAC Bangalore

He gave the brief introduction on Multimodal Interface and focused the Problems with Current
Interface Technology. He talked about the current experiments takes place at C-DAC.1)PoC for
Multimodal Interaction,2)Speech and Gesture Driven Input,3)Architecture,4)How to build using
Existing Open source solutions.
 Session 2:
Emerging Technology and web accessibility Implication

Language Technology to enable Accessibility

A G Ramakrishnan , Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering, IISc Bangalore.

He talked about the Current Machine Translation technologies must be made use of for
accessing English content of Govt. websites through other Indian languages and Current TTS
technologies must be made use of, for accessing Indian language as well as translated content to
be accessible as speech. He told about the current work at MILE , IISc Bangalore. He discussed
about the Automated Book Reader, Mosaicing of Camera Captured document images, Contour
based Color Clustering for Robust Binarization of Colored Text and binarization of colored text.

Accessible PDF documents

By Mamta Tandel, Head – Accessible Development, BarrierBreak Technologies

The advantages of presenting content in the form of Portable Document Format (PDF) document
are many as compared to other file formats. Apart from being cross-platform and extensible,
PDF documents maintain the look and feel of the document, offer content security and can also
be made accessible.The process of making PDF documents accessible is tricky but certainly
achievable if certain basic factors such as document structure, styles, use of standard elements
(tables, list, images etc) are taken care of. Scanned PDF documents can also be made accessible
but involves lot of effort.
 Accessible Flash for All
Vivek Gaikwad, Cognizant Bangalore

Flash is the most widely used technology to create multimedia elements like e-learning, games,
presentations, interactive quizzes, eye catching advertisements. It is used widely, as it is
appealing with its rich look and feel. But, while making it engaging and interactive, developers
and designers forget the difficulties people with disabilities face to go through it. The reason we
still see major chunk of flash over the web inaccessible, is the awareness about flash and
accessibility is not spread across the developer community. Flash can definitely be made
accessible with the support adobe has provided. We can create accessible flash content by
following few best practices.
 Session 3:
Business and Strategic perspective of Web Accessibility

By Kenny Kesar, Wipro India

He talked about the importance of web accessibility in web applications and web services. He
presented some work done by Wipro in the field of web accessibility.

Spoken Web
By Anupam jain, IBM India

Spoken Web is an initiative to create a web for the under-privileged population providing
information through mobile or landline phones. Designed and developed by IBM Research
Laboratory, India, Spoken Web tries to get past the issues of literacy and affordability by
introducing VoiceSites that can be accessed by any phone and can understand the local
language. It has immense applicability in the accessibility space where people can talk in
different languages, blind can access information without the need of a computer and physical
mobility is significantly reduced since the information can be accessed from any phone.
 Session 4:
Technology Development for Multilingual Accessibility in India

TTS for visually challenged in Indian Languages

By Ram Ramachandran, Nuance India

He talked about the technology and W3C standards in speech. He discussed about advantages of
Pre-recorded prompts used by majority of speech-enabled services. He talked about the
Prompting Problem in Text-to-speech tuning. He discussed about a PromptSculptor which is a
GUI-based toolkit for tuning TTS prompts.

Multilingual Web Accessibility: Some Insights from Cross-lingual

Information Retrieval
By Kalika Bali, Microsoft Research Labs India

The rapidly changing demographics of the internet population and the plethora of multilingual
content on the web has attracted the attention of the Information Retrieval community to
develop methodologies for cross-lingual information accessing. She presented some work done
at Microsoft Research Labs India on building a Hindi-English Cross-lingual Information Retrieval
(CLIR) System with a query likelihood based document ranking and its evaluation against the
FIRE2008 datasets. Lack of resources is still a major reason for relatively less number of efforts in
CLIR system development.
 Organizers

Swaran Lata Country Manager , W3C India

Dr. Somnath Chandra Deputy Country Manager ,W3C India

Srinivasu Chakravarthula Yahoo! R & D

Prashant Verma W3C India

Prashant Tyagi W3C India

Raghu Arora W3C India

Swati Arora W3C India

 Outcome of the Workshop

 Creating awareness towards implementation of W3C WCAG 2.0 Guidelines for

implementation of accessible web.

 Focus on development of associated technology like TTS, ASR, Voice Browser and other
assistive technologies in Indian Languages.

 Development of validation tool for designing of accessible Web pages.

 Evolution of National Recommendations on web accessibility in Indian Languages for

consideration by W3C.
 Participants

Name Organization Mobile Number Email-ID

Pradeepa V 9945388112 [email protected]
m

Amala Suganya 8807381979 [email protected]

Ravinder K NIMH,Secunderbad 9440237302 [email protected]

P S Thomus Aacay Organization 9790107138 [email protected]

m

Sirisha Peri Cambridge University 9591655146 [email protected]

Santhosh Aruvai 9790902787 [email protected]

Julie R Zachariah NIC 9446059934 [email protected]

Sachin Wagh Infosys 9158886122 [email protected]

Shrirang infosys [email protected]

Sahashnabudhe

suresh Infosys 9600049889 [email protected]

Javed ali Shaikh University of Pune 9763601218 [email protected]

Anil u joshi IBM Human research 9818830940 [email protected]

Sonia joseph NIC Bangalore 9449986508 [email protected]

Scientist-D

Sharath HS BTLIT,Student 8147495630 [email protected]

Raghuver kamath BTLIT,Student 8971300847 [email protected]

Rathankumar J M BTLIT,Student 9591755384 [email protected]

Shripal S BTLIT,Student 7259298840 [email protected]

RadhaKrishna D BTLIT,Student 9632321563 [email protected]

Raghavendra BR BTLIT,Student 9535790079 [email protected]

Sathish Thota CDAC , Project Engg 9492041226 [email protected]

Ramesh R CLIXDO,SE 9994534354 [email protected]

Karthikeyan K CLIXDO,SE 9944667345 [email protected]

R Logesh Nebcons, Student 9944785021 [email protected]

S Vinoth Nebcons Student 9597037732 [email protected]

n

M G renganatha CLIXOO 9994163067 [email protected]

A Jeevan Reddy Onya ,Accessibility 8050761380 Jeevanreeonyadigital.com

Tester

Rama chari Deoc ,Dued 9880583277 [email protected]

Samrat mondal Cognizant 9845463870 [email protected]

m

Md Azeemulla Cognizant 9986703619 Mohammed.azeemulla@cogniz

ant.com

S Balakrishnan Accenture 9986031299 [email protected]

m

Sajesh p jose Accenture 9986031299 [email protected]

Santhana Jagadesan Accenture 9986031299 [email protected]

om

Sana Lakshmi Accenture 9986031299 [email protected]

Vinay G VXL Etech 9886490240 [email protected]

Manaharan MPRO Technology 9844365617 [email protected]

Soumava Mandal Infosys 7259803739 [email protected]

Shaiji Mathew Webclick 98451724 [email protected]

Aruna Bharath Cognizant 8095502868 [email protected]

Shalini Servolets infotech 9986971886 [email protected]

Shashidhar Servolets infotech 9449073835 [email protected]

Sureender singh DIT 9868556503 [email protected]

Sanghamitra Mohanty Utkal University 9437141890 [email protected]

Sunil Kumar Kopparapu TCS 9223306454 [email protected]
Nelson Ambooken NIC ,Cochin 04842423769 [email protected]
Sai Shyam Appannagari Aacay Organization 8124337633 [email protected]
Jai Ganesh Infosys Technologies 9886042463 [email protected]
Sanghamitra Mohanty Utkal University 9437141890 [email protected]
Sunil Kumar Kopparapu TCS 9223306454 [email protected]
NEBCONS Institute of
Abhilash Koshy 9497265985 [email protected]
Management
Asma Salati Infosys Technologies Ltd 9008311733 [email protected]
Cognizant Technology
Pooja Nahata 9820725102 [email protected]
Solutions
Infosys Technologies
Anupriya Gupta 9008633998 [email protected]
Limited
N Satyanarayana CDAC Hyderabad 9949885216 [email protected]
Apurv Kalyan Awasthi CDAC 9014907517 [email protected]
Krishan Kumar Murugan Mitra Jyothi 9535008481 [email protected]
Prem Nawaz Khan PayPal 9566138545 [email protected]
Harihar Bhojak CDAC, Hyderabad 9848093665 [email protected]
M Uday Kumar CDAC 919989660775 [email protected]
Mamatha J CDAC,Hyderabad 9948631347 [email protected]
National Informatics
M G Chandra Sekhar Centre, Andhra Pradesh 09492925474 [email protected]
State Centre, Hyderabad
IncludeAll AS and
[email protected],
Rakesh Babu University of North 0019894001691
[email protected]
Carolina at Greensboro
Rohan VXL eTech Pvt Ltd 9036930900 [email protected]
National Informatics
Alka Mishra 09868253876 [email protected]
Centre
Ankit Bhilwar C DAC Hyderabad 9985872629 [email protected]
Advanced technology
blind students learning
dhananjay bhole centre department of 09850123212 [email protected]
education university of
pune
Centre for Development
Himadri S Khargharia 08088743215 [email protected]
of Advanced Computing
NEBCONS
R Bhaskaran CONSULTANCY INDIA 9632600533 [email protected]
PVT LTD
Centre for Development
Shaveta Garg 09886636570 [email protected]
of Advanced Computing
Rohit Gupta CDAC 9533187570 [email protected]
Cognizant Technology
Rakesh Paladugula Solutions India PVT 91 9948243336 [email protected]
limited
Onya Digital Solutions
Kiran Patil 9008718274 [email protected]
Private Limited
 Krishna priya CDAC 9440640225 [email protected]
Manmada Reddy Yahoo SDC 919740925248 [email protected]
Rajavel Manoharan Infosys Technologies Ltd 9731395143 [email protected]
hindulida guddagadu
ganesh shetti janar vikasa sangh 9481051635 [email protected]
kuntagani
Centre for Development
Dr M Sasikumar 9821165583 [email protected]
of Advanced Computing
Rajesh Jothi Yahoo 90360 11150 [email protected]
Servelots Infotech Pvt
Shalini 9986971886 [email protected]
Ltd
Arun J Martin VMware 9880150570 [email protected]
PHILIPS ELECTRONICS
Dayanand Parapurath 9886273217 [email protected]
INDIA LTD
Microsoft Research Labs
Kalika Bali 9886168535 [email protected]
India
Ms. Swaran Lata(Speaker) W3c India 9868851170
Prashant Verma W3c India 08800521042
Prashant Tyagi W3c India 9899879692
Raghu Arora W3c India 9990866307
Department of
Surender Singh 9868556503
Information Technology
BarrierBreak
Mamta Tandel(Speaker) 022-26860485
Technologies
Vivek Gaikwad(Speaker) Cognizant Technologies 09923660068
Cognizant Technology
Pooja Nahata 9820725102 [email protected]
Solutions
Manoharan Mpro Technologies 9900576591 [email protected]

Kalika Bali(Speaker) Microsoft 09886168535

Sandeep Datar(Speaker) Director UED 08030773827
Mr. Ramachndaran Nuance India
Kenny kesar(Speaker) Wipro
Anupam Jain(Speaker) IBM
Mr. Ramachndaran Nuance India