Every audit is automated and reproducible. A headless Chromium browser driven by Playwright loads each site the way a person's browser would. axe-core, the open-source rules engine behind Deque's tooling and the annual WebAIM Million survey, scans each page and reports every WCAG and ARIA rule its markup violates: unlabeled controls, missing form labels, low colour contrast, images without alt text, content outside landmarks, invalid ARIA, and broken heading order. Findings from embedded third-party widgets (YouTube players, social feeds, chat boxes) are excluded, so every count reflects the site owner's own markup.
Findings on this index are mechanical checks against the WCAG standard and the ARIA specification, not opinions. A button with no accessible name is announced by every screen reader as the word "button" and nothing else. Content outside all landmarks cannot be skipped to. A positive tabindex reorders keyboard focus for every visitor. Each finding names the axe rule, the number of elements affected, and links the rule reference so anyone can verify.
Automated scanning catches roughly a third of all WCAG issues. Real assistive-technology testing by disabled users finds more, not fewer, problems than listed here. Every number on this index is therefore a floor, not a ceiling. Audits cover public pages only; nothing behind a login is ever scanned. Scans identify themselves in their User-Agent and run at low request rates.
India's RPWD Act 2016 (Section 42) mandates ICT accessibility. The Supreme Court's 2025 ruling in the Pragya Prasun matter ordered enforceable digital accessibility standards. GIGW guidelines have existed for years. Yet of 50 essential public-service sites audited here, every single one that responded produced verifiable accessibility failures on its landing page. Roughly 70 million Indians live with a visual impairment. They bank, file taxes, and claim health cover on these sites, or fail to.