Each year, the International Day of Persons with Disabilities (December 3) arrives with an official theme that tries to capture the urgency of inclusion. The theme for 2025 – fostering disability-inclusive societies for advancing social progress – was elaborate, but the idea underneath was straightforward. We speak of inclusion often, and we have laws and policies in place that promise it, from the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 to the National Education Policy, 2020. The trouble is that the promise rarely meets reality.
There is no denying that the spread of digital technology has changed the lives of many disabled people in meaningful ways. For persons with visual or mobility disabilities, the ability to work from home, order essentials, and connect with communities online has been transformative. Yet, a persistent question sits underneath this progress – who is actually able to take advantage of these new tools?
Over the past two years, I have been involved in the Alternate-Languages-Tech (ALT) Project, funded by Whose Knowledge? The project looks squarely at the link between digital access, language justice, and visual impairment in India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. My role, based in Kolkata, focuses on the particular problems faced by Bengali-speaking visually disabled users. I approached the issue from two directions: How visually disabled people use the Internet, and how much space exists for them to contribute in their own language.
One phrase quickly became central to my work – ‘preferred language’.
Nearly every visually disabled respondent I met, except for one woman in Murshidabad who still uses a basic keypad phone, said that they ‘preferred’ browsing the Internet in English. A little patient questioning revealed something more complicated. The so-called preference was forced by circumstance. English is simply the only stable, usable option. Trying to navigate in Bengali introduces obstacle after obstacle.
The barriers are technical but widespread. Text-to-speech software on smartphones defaults to English. Switching to Bengali slows the device and makes many apps unusable. Bengali news portals are not accessible to blind readers and rarely include image descriptions, leaving major gaps in understanding. Most Bengali PDFs online are non-OCR image files. Converting them into readable formats is a slow process that demands both high data usage and reliable connectivity through tools like InstaReader.
These hurdles deepen the already familiar link between poverty and disability in South Asia. Many visually disabled users rely entirely on limited mobile data, making the conversion of image PDFs an exhausting, sometimes impossible task. Students are particularly affected. A visually disabled undergraduate at Jadavpur University, educated in Bengali, told me she often has to depend on human readers for class materials. Her peers in English-medium programmes can download accessible texts immediately, while she faces a long and anxious wait.
Typing in Bengali presents its own challenges. Several respondents noted that Bengali keyboards often malfunction with screen-readers, forcing them to avoid writing longer posts or comments online. Some turn to Google Translate or other AI tools, but the results are often inaccurate or incoherent. One visually disabled primary school teacher remarked that he sometimes understands the original English more easily than the Bengali generated by these systems.
The result is a hierarchy inside the disability community itself. Those who are comfortable in English gain advantages such as access to knowledge, ease of communication and social mobility, while those who are not lose ground. Many respondents spoke of this divide in quiet but clear terms.
If we are serious about disability-inclusive societies, then we must confront this gap directly. It is not enough to add ramps and screen-reader tags while leaving local languages behind. A vast number of disabled people in India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan have been historically excluded not only by disability but by language and class. Without accessible digital content in the languages people live in, our policies and celebrations remain only as symbolic gestures, rather than the genuine commitments we would prefer them to be.
True inclusion must begin with the right to information in one’s own tongue. Until that becomes a priority, awareness campaigns will continue to miss the very communities they claim to represent.
About the main illustration: A screengrab of a Wikipedia page showing a sample of Bengali Braille alphabets
