On Complaint By Visually Impaired Individual, Court Of CCPD Asks Ola Cabs To Make Its App Accessible To Persons With Disabilities

The Court of Chief Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities has issued a series of recommendations to Ola Cabs aimed at improving accessibility features within their application, following a complaint filed by one Amar Jain, a person with 100% visual impairment. The complaint highlighted various accessibility barriers encountered while accessing the Ola app, including unorganized services, lack of labeled buttons, inaccessible images, and absence of an embedded accessibility framework. Appointment of an accessibility auditor and a nodal/grievance redressal officer; A clear direction from the CEO that all existing features will be made accessible and new features will be rolled out only after ensuring accessibility; Full compliance with IS 17802 and submission of an undertaking in this regard; Annual self-certification of continued compliance with accessibility standards to be signed by the CEO/an Independent Director which should be produced to this Court upon requisition.” The complaint highlighted the violation and non-adherence to accessibility provisions outlined in the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016, and its corresponding Rules by M/s Ani Technologies Private Limited, Bangalore, referred to as the Respondent. Some others have nonsensical labels; Multiple elements are clubbed together which prevents screen reader users from selecting a given service and operating functionality of the app; Many images do not have the alt text which makes images completely inaccessible for persons with blindness: Banners have no meaningful text which is confusing in terms of accessibility; The app has no accessibility framework embedded which prevents persons with blindness from operating the app; Persons with blindness are not able to select pick-up location and destination from the search results as that is not announced by the screen reader; Owing to all of these barriers combined, the experience of accessing the app for the Complainant is akin to a sighted person being required to access an app in a foreign language that she does not understand. The Court endorsed the Complainant's initial observations and urged the Respondent to prioritize making crucial features like pickup & drop location and driver information accessible to PWDs, enabling them to use the app independently.