Kathmandu, April 30 -- The Ministry of Women, Children and Senior Citizens published a public notice on April 10, inviting feedback on a draft amendment to the Act Relating to Rights of Persons with Disabilities, 2017. The notice and the draft remain available on the ministry's website. However, the very people the law is meant to serve remain shut out of the information itself. Although the document explicitly calls for making information accessible, the published notice is, in reality, not accessible.

The documents were uploaded in image-based files and in Preeti font formats that screen reader software used by visually impaired people cannot interpret. Key elements such as headings, paragraphs and lists were not properly tagged, makin...