KDU–Kelaniya Guidelines — Community-Tested Web Accessibility Fixes for Sri Lanka's Visually Impaired Users

Sri Lanka's Ministry of Health estimates that roughly 9% of people over 40 live with some degree of vision impairment nationally, yet as of 2016 no dedicated design guidance existed for building accessible government or public websites in the country.
A 2016 IEEE TENSYMP study by Gopinath, Senthooran, Lojenaa and Kartheeswaran audited 47 Sri Lankan government websites with the WAVE tool and related checks. It found that, while many pages passed basic automated validation as "error-free", more than 90% remained inaccessible or inconvenient in practice for people with disabilities, and none reached full WCAG 2.0 compliance.
Building on that baseline, a 2023 design-science study from General Sir John Kotelawala Defence University and the University of Kelaniya tested nine accessibility interventions — alt text, semantic headings, resizable text, keyboard navigation, audio narration, Braille-exportable print — directly with visually impaired users. A ten-person focus group (three fully blind, three with partial vision, four with mild vision loss) rated paired websites with and without the features on a five-point Likert scale. A separate twenty-person focus group testing semantic navigation and keyboard shortcuts reported no low or no-satisfaction ratings at all: 10% very high, 45% high and 45% moderate satisfaction. On audio narration specifically, participants split across three distinct satisfaction reasons (44%, 37%, 26%), while versions without audio drew explicit complaints that access was "difficult" or "very inconvenient". Five independent web-accessibility experts validated the final recommendations.
This remains a small-sample academic study — 10 to 20 participants per test — rather than a deployed national standard, and the authors identify no follow-on institutional programme that adopted the guidelines at scale.

Read the full analysis: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.06924