Accessibility-first,
plain-language always.
Municipal sites, state portals, public-sector agencies. The visitor is filing a form, paying a tax, or looking up a deadline. They are not browsing; they are working.
Government sites in India are the surface where civic UX failure has the largest aggregate cost. Every minute a citizen wastes finding the right form is a minute charged against the nation’s productivity; every form that’s unfillable on a low-end Android is a citizen excluded. The standards that should govern these sites — WCAG 2.1 AA at minimum, plain-language drafting, mobile-first responsive design, vernacular language support — are well-established. The actual delivery has been wildly inconsistent. The new GIGW (Guidelines for Indian Government Websites) 3.0 framework, in force since 2024, is a stronger compliance scaffold than what came before; whether departments actually meet it varies sharply.
WCAG and GIGW fundamentals for government sites
- Colour contrast at WCAG AA minimum for all text and interactive elements. Most failing government sites fail here first.
- Keyboard navigation for every interactive element. Form fields, dropdowns, file uploads — all of it.
- Screen-reader compatibility, tested against NVDA at minimum. Not assumed; tested.
- Multi-language support — at least Hindi and the state’s official language; ideally English, Hindi, regional.
- Mobile responsive design that holds up at 360-pixel width — the common Indian Android width.
- A “Skip to main content” link as the first focusable element.
74%
Government-sector sites we audited in 2024 (across state and municipal levels) that failed at least one WCAG 2.1 AA criterion on first-pass automated testing. The manual audit always finds more. The technical capability to fix these exists; the institutional commitment has been the missing element.
Does our state government department site need to support every Indian language?
Practically, no. GIGW 3.0 requires English plus Hindi plus the state’s official language(s) for state government sites. Adding additional regional languages where significant population groups speak them (Urdu in Hyderabad municipal sites, for instance) is best practice but not strictly required. The technical work for multi-language support has gotten dramatically easier with modern CMSes — the cost is now mostly translation effort, not engineering effort. Most departments under-invest in translation quality; machine-translated text in vernacular languages reads poorly and damages credibility more than it serves the visitor.
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