Nigeria wants to build more assistive technology for people with disabilities. But many of the digital platforms that technology is supposed to help people use remain broken.
The Nigerian Communications Commission recently challenged young innovators to tackle this problem. At its fourth Hackathon Live Show in Abuja, held on August 26 and 27, contestants built tools under the theme “Technology Without Barriers.” Their ideas included AI-powered speech-to-text, real-time sign language translation, voice-enabled complaint systems, accessible customer care tools, image-to-voice navigation, and inclusive employment platforms.
That effort matters. Still, it runs into a problem Nigeria has documented for years. Many government and private digital platforms lock out the very people they are meant to serve.
The scale of the issue is large. The National Commission for Persons with Disabilities estimates that about 35 million Nigerians live with a disability. For this group, an inaccessible website can block access to jobs, banking, education, identification, and government services that now live mostly online.
Nigeria already has rules meant to prevent this. The National Information Technology Development Agency requires government websites to give equal access to all users. Its guidelines call for compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, the global standard for accessible design.
In 2024, the Communications Minister announced plans for a national web design system to help government agencies meet these standards. But reporting this month found no public evidence that a final toolkit exists. It also found no evidence that agencies have rolled it out.
The gap between policy and practice keeps showing up in independent checks. A 2024 review of all 36 state websites and the Federal Capital Territory found that 26 states failed to meet NITDA’s guidelines. People with disabilities could not use fourteen of those websites at all.
A separate investigation in 2025 found the same pattern across banks, fintech apps, e-commerce platforms, and telecom services. Common problems included unlabelled buttons, missing image descriptions, and forms that do not work with screen readers. A more recent audit this year of major public institutions, including university admission portals and identity systems, found that none had basic accessibility features in place.
This is why assistive technology alone cannot fix the problem. Tools like screen readers only work with the information a website makes available. If a button has no label or a form is poorly built, the tool cannot work around that on its own. So platforms must build accessibility in from the start, not patch it in later.
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The stakes go beyond browsing a website. Nigeria increasingly relies on biometric identification for essential services. Reports have documented cases where fingerprint scanners failed to register people with certain physical disabilities, leaving them unable to get a National Identification Number. Without that number, opening a bank account or applying for a loan becomes difficult or nearly impossible.
Some barriers do need specialised tools. A sign language translation app, for instance, solves a problem that ordinary web design cannot fix. But other barriers do not need a new product at all. They need the existing platform to work properly the first time.
When a government portal fails, one response is to build a separate tool that helps people navigate around the failure. That approach can help in the short term. But it also shifts the burden of accessibility away from the institution and onto the person trying to use the service.
The Nigerian Communications Commission has acknowledged that people with disabilities still face barriers across banking, healthcare, education, and government platforms. Its response is to fund more innovation. That is a reasonable step. But the evidence from Nigeria’s own websites shows that innovation alone cannot solve this problem.
Nigeria should not measure digital inclusion only by counting new assistive tools it produces. It should also measure how many everyday services Nigerians can use without needing an extra tool just to get in the door.
