Mission Accessibility Asks Rapido To Make Mobile App Accessible For PwDs

Dear Signers, 

Thank you so much for your support. I want to inform you that we’ve taken this petition to Mission Accessibility, a nonprofit that works to enable access to the Internet for persons with disabilities (PwDs). Mission Accessibility has been at the forefront of getting new-age startups and tech companies to acknowledge the need for building mobile apps and websites that are fully accessible to PwDs. 

Click here to share this petition on WhatsApp. Please help me get to 10,000 signatures so that Rapido realises the need to make its platform accessible for all users. Click here to share this petition on Twitter. 

Last year, in response to a complaint filed by Rahul Bajaj, a lawyer with 100% visual impairment and cofounder of Mission Accessibility, the court of the Chief Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities (CCPD) ordered Practo, the online healthcare service provider, to make its website and app fully accessible for disabled people. 

Besides Practo and now Rapido, Mission Accessibility has identified several other digital applications functioning without acknowledging the need to make their platforms accessible for PwDs. 

For the matter raised in our petition, Mission Accessibility has written to Rapido, asking them to conduct a comprehensive accessibility audit of their app to identify and address all accessibility barriers for individuals with disabilities. Mission Accessibility has also asked Rapido to proactively engage with accessibility experts, including individuals with disabilities who may have used the Rapido app and would have some critical feedback to share. Lastly, they’ve requested Rapido to provide specialised training to their customer care representatives to effectively address accessibility-related concerns and provide timely resolutions to customers with disabilities. You may recall what I’ve highlighted in my petition --- how I requested the customer support executive multiple times to put me in touch with someone from the product team at Rapido who could understand my concern and explain the challenges faced by the product team. On each occasion, the customer support executive would assure me a resolution to my grievance at the earliest and then proceed to close my complaint ‘ticket’. 

This is not just about Rapido. I’ve seen petitions on Change.org highlighting the same problems with the apps for Flipkart and Airtel Thanks as well. 

The struggle to make India truly ‘independent’ for PwDs has just begun. Please help me keep up the momentum for this campaign by sharing it widely amongst your network on social media. Click here to share this petition on Twitter, and click here for Facebook.