The Citizen Experience team at the Pakistan Digital Authority (PDA) recently conducted a Digital Accessibility Feedback Session with persons with visual, low-vision, and hearing disabilities, with support from DeafTawk, which helped engage and arrange participants for the session. PDA framed the exercise around a specific principle, saying digital accessibility is not just about compliance but about ensuring every citizen can access government services independently, with dignity and confidence. DeafTawk, a social enterprise founded in 2018 that operates a mobile application offering real-time sign language interpretation, has previously partnered with government bodies on accessibility work, including a January 2025 MoU with the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority to provide online sign language interpretation and AI-powered text-to-sign tools at PTA offices.
The session surfaced several practical challenges participants face when trying to use government digital services, including inaccessible documents, poor screen-reader compatibility, missing captions, low contrast, and limited accessible customer-support channels. These findings echo a broader gap identified in Pakistan’s accessibility landscape, where although existing laws mandate digital accessibility for persons with disabilities, none of the current statutes explicitly reference WCAG or any other technical standard, leaving individual institutions to decide for themselves how rigorously to apply accessibility guidelines to their platforms. PDA said the insights gathered during the session will help strengthen accessibility standards aligned with WCAG 2.2 AA, the latest version of the globally recognised Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and translate the lived experiences shared by participants into practical improvements across government digital services.
Pakistan is home to an estimated 1.2 million registered persons with hearing impairment and a significantly larger population with visual impairments, a group that has historically faced limited accessible options when interacting with public services, particularly outside major metropolitan cities. The barriers identified during PDA’s session, inaccessible documents and poor screen-reader compatibility in particular, speak directly to the kind of day-to-day friction that can effectively deny disabled citizens equal access to services that are technically available online but practically unusable without proper accessibility design. PDA’s approach of directly engaging affected citizens, rather than relying solely on internal audits or desk-based compliance reviews, reflects international practice, where accessibility experts have noted that inclusion succeeds only when technical standards are built into every stage of digital service delivery rather than retrofitted after launch.
PDA described the goal of building truly inclusive digital government as requiring designs created with citizens, not just for citizens, positioning this feedback session as a starting point for incorporating lived experience directly into future platform design decisions. The session adds accessibility to PDA’s growing list of citizen-facing priorities, following its earlier engagements with NDMA on digital inclusion in disaster preparedness and its ongoing work on WASL, the National Data Exchange Layer. Whether the specific WCAG 2.2 AA alignment translates into measurable improvements across government websites and digital platforms will likely depend on how PDA coordinates these accessibility standards with the individual agencies and departments that actually build and maintain the services citizens use day to day.
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