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Bangla, Hindi and Urdu speakers with visual impairments face major barriers to digital access, despite these languages holding official status. Accessibility, Language and Tech for the People (ALT) by Whose Knowledge?, is a multi-year research-in-action initiative spanning India, Bangladesh and Pakistan. ALT investigates how disability, patriarchy and class inequalities influence online participation, and who gets left out. 

Previous digital accessibility studies have shed light on issues such as the impact of ableist policies on technological implementation. Yet the intersection of language justice and disability in non‑English contexts across South Asia, and its deeper, long-term consequences for people with visual impairments, remains far-less studied. 

ALT addresses this gap by foregrounding the lived experiences of visually impaired users in their own languages and contexts, centring disability, gender and class (which is South Asia frequently translates into caste) as intersecting forces that determine whether technology expands a person’s world or quietly closes it off.

As the barriers visually impaired people face are structural, the methodology had to be both collaborative and grounded. Research teams in each country were led by visually impaired researchers working in Bangla, Hindi or Urdu. They designed and conducted local‑language surveys, platform audits, in‑depth interviews and focus group discussions, treating users with visual impairments not as “beneficiaries” but as co‑researchers whose expertise shaped both the questions and the answers.

Findings and thematic observations

Nearly 160 participants across three countries represented a diverse array of occupations, including students, teachers, public officials, managers, writers, housewives, technologists and creators from rural and urban areas, spanning ages from people in their twenties to older adults.

Access to technology is not optional, but essential. Like people without disabilities, visually impaired people depend on it for vital information, healthcare, education, employment, banking, entertainment, culture, communication and overall social well-being.

Our findings reveal that users with visual impairments overwhelmingly want to use technology in their local languages, yet the systems they depend on consistently force them to fall back on English. In Pakistan, despite more than half of surveyed users preferring Urdu, poor quality Urdu support forces 89% of users to........

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