The communications and information technology ministry' s IT department has launched the new, inclusive avatar of it website which is accessible to the visually challenged and conforms with W3C guidelines on accessibility.

The new website was launched by communication and IT minister A. Raja on sidelines of an event to felicitate the awardees of Web Ratna Awards’ 09, on Monday at Vigyan Bhawan in New Delhi. 

The accessibility options on the new website enables a user to increase or decrease the font size, change color scheme, increase or decrease text spacing according to user preferences.

The new portal can be viewed from a variety of devices such as Desktop, Laptop computers, web-enabled mobile devices; etc. To facilitate people with disabilities the portal has used assistive technologies such as screen readers and screen magnifiers. The option of changing color scheme will help people with color blindness. 

The new portal is designed using XHTML 1.0 transitional to meet guidelines for Indian government websites and also adheres to level AA of the web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 laid down by the world wide web consortium (W3C). 

It may be noted that Governance Now in its March issue had pointed out that the website of DIT is not W3C compliance as it does not meet the accessibility criteria.