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Synopsis

The Delhi High Court has directed the eSewa Kendra of the High Court and District Courts to extend necessary assistance to specially abled or visually impaired advocates and litigants in converting non-OCR files to accessibility compliant format.

“eSewa Kendra of this Court and Delhi District Courts shall render necessary assistance to specially abled/visually impaired Advocates/litigants in person, in converting the non-OCR filed to accessibility complaint format. The contact details of eSewa Kendra be also mentioned on the website of this court and Delhi District Courts for rendering necessary assistance in this regard”, the officer order read.

An administrative order, issued by the High Court’s Registrar General Ravinder Dudeja, asked the Principal District and Sessions Judges of all the district courts and the registrar (IT) of the high court to ensure that this facility is made available at the e-Sewa Kendras and the contact details be uploaded on their respective websites.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems enable visually impaired people to scan printed text and then have it spoken in synthetic speech or saved to a computer file. Synthetic speech is computer-generated audio output that resembles human speech.

Recently, on the 77th Independence Day, the High Court launched several new information and communication technology (ICT) projects. The several new projects include, “digital platform for sharing trial court record” and its “web accessibility complaint cause list” for visually impaired lawyers, litigants and public at large by using accessibility text to speech software.

The High Court has already launched projects like e-filing, e-Inspection of records, Digital Traffic Courts, Hybrid e-Seva Kendra etc. Accessibility-oriented I.C.T. initiatives will serve as a giant leap in making digital ecosystem accessibility needs complaint and will pave the way for other Courts to follow pursuit.