a2i's Disability Innovation Lab — Disability-Led Advocacy Forces Accessible Bank Design in Bangladesh

Bangladesh's Aspire to Innovate (a2i) Programme, run by the ICT Division under the Prime Minister's Office, set up a Disability Innovation Lab (DIL) as its flagship platform for making the country's digital transformation accessible to persons with disabilities, including a panel of accessibility auditors who are themselves blind, deaf or physically disabled.
The Lab's most concrete result to date grew out of an individual complaint: a2i national consultant Vashkar Bhattacharjee, who is blind, was refused a standard credit card by a bank that instead demanded a 200,000-taka deposit and offered to issue the card in his wife's name. After he took the case to Bangladesh's National Human Rights Commission, which held a hearing on 17 January 2022, the bank issued him a card within a week. a2i used the ruling as leverage to audit five major banks — Sonali Bank, Islami Bank, The City Bank, Standard Chartered Bank and Eastern Bank Limited — and briefed their executives on accessible service design on 2 March 2022.
That advocacy fed into the 'Digital Service and Web Designing Guideline for Inclusive Accessibility 2022', issued by the ICT Division and aligned with WCAG 2.1, which government and financial-sector teams are now expected to follow when designing digital services.
The gap it is trying to close remains wide: a 2025 joint study by UNDP Bangladesh and a2i found that only 4% of persons with disabilities use mobile internet, against 27% of people without disabilities — a reminder that guidelines and audits have not yet translated into equal digital access.

Read the full analysis: https://bbf.digital/fighting-for-accessibility-in-the-financial-sector-in-bangladesh