How can information be ‘barrier-free’? A critical reading of china’s web accessibility policies in the 21st century

Abstract

After the World Summit on the Information Society and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, states translated the global vision of digital inclusion into local policies at the national and regional levels. This article examines how state agencies in China, a technologically advanced country with a large disabled population, have leveraged the agenda of web accessibility over the course of the last two decades. By carrying out an analysis of 93 national policies and 21 technical guidelines issued between 2001 and 2021, this article critically examines how and why the Chinese state’s embrace of the term ‘barrier-free information’ (信息无障碍) does not result in a coherent policy paradigm but might instead engender new barriers which in fact have the potential to disorient disabled people.

Points of interests

• Using the case of contemporary China, this article illustrates the problems of implementing the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in a particular national context.

• We provide an overview of the Chinese state’s use of the term ‘barrier-free information’ (信息无障碍) as used in 114 national policies.

• While ‘barrier-free information’ has become a new buzzword in China, we show that its legal definitions are unclear, and its related policies are often in conflict with each other.

• We argue that more research is needed to understand the negative effects of incoherent accessibility policies.

Keywords:

• Digital inclusion
• disabled persons’ organization
• disability policy
• China
• critical policy analysis
• bureaucracy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.