Yahoo! India R&D and W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) India will be jointly hosting a conference on Web Accessibility. This will be held in Bangalore on 11th December 2010 at the Yahoo! office at Bagmane Tech Park, C.V. Raman Nagar. This conference is part of Yahoo!’s commitment towards spreading awareness about Web Accessibility in India.
In India, approximately 20 million people [Ref Census 2001] suffer from various kinds of disabilities and the challenge lies in providing user-friendly, citizen-centric web-based services to all people regardless of their abilities. Due to the cultural and regional diversity of India, with its 22 constitutionally recognized languages, the problem is even more complex as the work needs to be done to support the development and deployment of assistive technologies for people with disabilities, while factoring in these multiple languages. The Web Content accessibility guideline [WCAG 2.0] laid down by W3C is a key achievement in this direction.
Shouvick Mukherjee, VP and CEO – Yahoo! India Research & Development says, "Yahoo! is committed to accessibility and enabling people with disabilities to enjoy the Internet experience. In support of this, Yahoo! has been an early adopter of accessibility guidelines across its properties and has been a thought leader in driving web accessibility forward. Further, we are supporting the Government of India and helping to create awareness on adoption of standards, education, implementation and policy level aspects to provide web-based accessible solutions for disabled citizens."
The conference will provide participants with a unique platform to interact and understand the needs of people with disabilities using the Internet and discuss implementation issues. It also aims to capture the requirements for Indian languages implementation aspects of W3C WCAG 2.0 standards, so the consolidated national recommendations can be submitted to W3C for their consideration for possible inclusion.
Shri N. Ravi Shanker, Joint Secretary, Dept. of Information Technology, will inaugurate the conference, while Victor Tsaran, Sr. Accessibility Program Manager, Yahoo! will be the keynote speaker for this conference. The attendees will comprise technology developers, web service and solution providers, policy makers, NGOs and users. There will be presentations by prominent industry spokespeople, government representatives and professors.
