Foundation Projects

People who are not educated enough, among other reasons, to be comfortable with browsing text can be termed as print-impaired. Web content is text heavy and requires people to be comfortable reading text authored in different contexts. The next large segment of people who will soon have access to the Web, through mobile phones or other devices, are likely to be relatively more print-impaired.

The project estimates that in India alone there are a billion people who are not comfortable reading web content either due to illiteracy or simply due to estranged nature of much of the web-content.

This project conducted investigations into web-accessibility for print-impaired with an aim to develop guidelines on authoring web pages.

The project then identified and demonstrate the feasibility of a model, a web-framework, which can exploit the authoring guidelines to help localize web-content to the print-impaired. This project was called Alipi, meaning the alphabet.

It models a web-framework for a re-narration web that can assist in pulling up more accessible narrations of the content that suits user's literacy and locality profile. The project then developed a supporting tool set and demonstrated the feasibility and the utility of this web-accessibility proposal. It will then aim to initiate a process of engagement with government bodies and the World Wide Web Consortium on Alipi guidelines for authoring web pages that facilitate re-narration.