The UBA Action Plan
Our goal is to ensure that public infrastructure and digital services are transformed in order to make them usable by all. And, we intend to achieve this through advocacy, activism and direct involvement.
Level 1: Understanding the special needs
People having sensory impairment or mobility issues, and health care professionals who work with them are our key stake holders. Going forward, we will conduct interviews and surveys to help us identify the problems that our key stake holders encounter while using public infrastructure and digital services. We will also build consensus over possible measures through which these problems can be resolved.
Level 2: Creating special guidelines to address special needs
United Nations’ “Design Manual for Barrier Free Environment” and National Institute of Building Sciences’ “Design Guidelines for the Visual Environment” are some notable guidelines that claim to make public infrastructure accessible to people with special needs. For web accessibility, we have the American Disability Act (ADA)’s guidelines for making government and business websites accessible to people with disability.
While UBA accepts some of these guidelines, we believe that existing guidelines are not holistic. ADA’s web accessibility guidelines for example, only focus on improving the accessibility of websites. However, they ignore the accessibility of operating systems, browsers and other software applications through which digital services are accessed. The ground reality is that an ‘out of the box’ smartphone needs to be customized extensively before it can be used by someone with vision impairment. So, UBA will revaluate existing guidelines and if necessary improve upon them.
Based on the special needs of our key stake holders and solutions offered by them, we intend to formulate extensive guidelines to cover all types of public infrastructure and digital services. The solutions, suggestions and approaches that form the UBA guidelines will be subjected to rigorous efficacy tests. A group of people with various types of sensory impairment and mobility issues will serve as our test subjects, and they will be made to evaluate the efficacy of our solutions by determining their impact on usability of public infrastructure and digital services. These tests will be conducted under controlled and secure environment, while adhering to scientific principles and practices. Through intensive testing we intend to ensure that our guidelines actually improve and enhance the usability of public infrastructure and digital services for people with sensory impairment and mobility issues.
Level 3. Making public infrastructure and digital services usable by all
UBA’s long term initiative is to continually create awareness about the problems of inconsiderate / non-inclusive design and how it adversely effects a significant part of the population. By creating awareness, we hope to propagate a culture of change, so that people, organizations and governments realize the need to reform public infrastructure and digital services.
UBA’s operations are not merely restricted to awareness and advocacy, as we intend to actively contribute towards making the world ‘usable for all’. The “UBA Certification Program” is an audit based reform initiative for making public infrastructure and digital services truly usable by all.
We intend to launch the “UBA Certification Program” as soon as possible. Once the program is active, organizations / institutions responsible for management of public infrastructure / digital services can apply for certification. The UBA team will rigorously audit the facility / service and submit a ‘Special Needs Fulfilment Requirements Document’ (SNFRD) to the concerned authority. We expect the applicant organization to upgrade their facility / service to make it 100% compliant with the issued SNFRD. Following the upgrade, the facility / service will be audited again and if the auditing team is able to check all the boxes on the SNFRD, then ‘UBA Certification’ will be awarded. All UBA certified facilities / services will be subjected to ongoing audits on regular basis to ensure that they remain usable for people with special needs.
UBA has been founded on the belief, that everyone has the right to pursuit of happiness, aspirations and economic prosperity. Hence, for the well being of the society it is absolutely essential that public infrastructure and digital services should be convenient enough for independent use by people with special needs. To uphold our belief, we will rally public support in favour of laws that make inclusive design / planning mandatory for public infrastructure and digital services.