AccessLumens Research · July 2026
The State of SEBI-Regulated Financial Accessibility 2026
SEBI’s remediation deadline lands on 31 July 2026. Weeks out, 61% of the regulated entities we scanned still ship a critical barrier, and India’s two main stock exchanges could not be audited at all.
Under the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act and SEBI’s accessibility mandate for regulated entities, India’s market infrastructure and intermediaries are on a hard timeline: compliance status submitted by 31 March 2026, accessibility audits done by 30 April 2026, remediation complete by 31 July 2026, and annual audits thereafter. We scanned the homepages of 72 SEBI-regulated sites, exchanges, depositories, brokers, asset managers, RTAs, KRAs, and platforms, with WCAG 2.2 AA checks plus scripted keyboard testing. The question: with two deadlines already passed, is the ecosystem actually ready for the third?
61%
Ship a critical barrier
of 61 scored sites
52%
Fail keyboard testing
at least one scripted check
15.3%
Could not be audited
bot walls and dead renders
88.2
Average score
out of 100
The SEBI accessibility timeline
- Passed
31 March 2026
Accessibility readiness and compliance status submission
- Passed
30 April 2026
Completion of accessibility audits
- Ahead
31 July 2026
Completion of remediation and compliance
- Ahead
Thereafter
Annual accessibility audits and reporting
This scan ran in mid-July 2026: after the readiness submissions and the audit deadline, and just ahead of the remediation deadline. What it measures is, in effect, the ecosystem’s homework the week before it is due.
The average score across the 61 scored sites was 88.2 out of 100, which sounds encouraging until you look underneath. 61% still carried at least one critical barrier: a login button a screen reader announces as nothing, a fund factsheet link with no name, a menu a keyboard cannot reach. For an investor using assistive technology, one critical barrier on the path to their money is the whole story.
Of the 72 sites attempted, 61 returned scannable results. 5 blocked the scan with bot protection or robots.txt directives, and another 6 never rendered a usable page for a headless browser. That reachability picture includes some of the largest names in Indian capital markets, and it is a finding in its own right.
The exchange problem
The front doors of India’s capital markets are its exchanges. We attempted all four national exchanges. Three could not be measured.
The homepage never rendered for a headless browser after repeated attempts. The world's largest derivatives exchange cannot be audited by automated accessibility tooling.
Blocked by Akamai bot protection. Asia's oldest stock exchange is unreachable to the tools used to verify accessibility.
robots.txt disallows scanning. We honor that directive, so MCX went unmeasured.
The one exchange we could reach scored a perfect 100 with zero detectable issues.
A wall that stops an accessibility scanner also degrades screen readers, voice control, and the automated monitoring the annual-audit requirement implies. If the regulator’s own market infrastructure cannot be verified from the outside, the mandate’s reporting phase is going to be interesting.
“Two of SEBI’s compliance deadlines have already passed. On the evidence of the homepages, most of the ecosystem is not ready for the third.”
Key findings
1. Three in five regulated entities still ship a critical barrier.
61% of scored sites carried at least one critical issue, and 49% failed WCAG 4.1.2 (Name, Role, Value), the criterion most frequently cited in accessibility litigation worldwide. These are homepage-level failures, visible to any audit, three months after SEBI’s audit deadline.
2. India’s largest fund houses are among the worst performers.
SBI Mutual Fund, the country’s largest asset manager, scored 75 with 4 critical barriers. Asset managers as a group averaged 85.1, with 67% carrying a critical issue. The industry that runs India’s retail savings has the second-worst category average in the study.
3. Half the ecosystem fails scripted keyboard testing.
52% of scored sites failed at least one keyboard check: 25% have no skip link, 23% hide keyboard focus, and IIFL Securities’ homepage contains an outright keyboard trap. Keyboard access is the baseline for screen-reader and motor-impaired users; it is also the part of WCAG that automated overlays cannot paper over.
4. One in seven sites cannot be audited from the outside.
15.3% of the list, including NSE, BSE, MCX, HDFC Mutual Fund, and 5paisa, either blocked the scan or never rendered a page. Whatever their internal audits say, external verification, the thing an annual reporting regime depends on, is currently impossible for these entities.
5. A clean result is achievable, and 3 entities proved it.
CAMS (Computer Age Mgmt Services), TradingView India, National Commodity & Derivatives Exchange (NCDEX) each scored 100 with zero detectable issues. An RTA serving crores of folios, a charting platform, and a commodity exchange. Different scales, same outcome: conformance at the homepage level is a normal engineering result, not a moonshot.
India’s five largest fund houses
The five largest asset managers by AUM hold the majority of India’s mutual fund savings. None of the four we could reach scanned clean, and the third-largest blocked the scan entirely.
75
SBI Mutual Fund
#1 by AUM
4 critical
89
ICICI Prudential MF
#2 by AUM
1 critical
Blocked
HDFC Mutual Fund
#3 by AUM
84
Nippon India MF
#4 by AUM
2 critical
89
Kotak Mahindra MF
#5 by AUM
1 critical
Three sites got it right
A perfect 100 with zero issues detected, across three very different corners of the market.
100
CAMS (Computer Age Mgmt Services)
RTA
100
TradingView India
Investment Platform
100
National Commodity & Derivatives Exchange (NCDEX)
Stock Exchange
Category by category
Credit rating agencies sit at the bottom of the table, with every scored site carrying a critical barrier. Asset managers are close behind at 85.1. Brokers (88.3 average) split sharply: the discount-broker generation mostly scores well while several full-service houses trail. RTAs lead the ecosystem.
Critical-barrier rate by category
Share of scored sites in each category with at least one critical barrier. Lower is better. Categories with a single scored site are excluded from ranking.
| Category | Scored | Avg score | % with critical | Skip link missing | Focus not visible |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Credit Rating Agency | 3/3 | 80.7 | 100% | 33% | 0% |
| AMC / Mutual Fund | 18/20 | 85.1 | 67% | 22% | 33% |
| Wealth Management | 2/2 | 87 | 50% | 0% | 100% |
| Stock Broker | 18/21 | 88.3 | 67% | 39% | 17% |
| Regulator | 1/1 | 89 | 100% | 0% | 100% |
| MF Platform | 4/5 | 89.5 | 75% | 0% | 25% |
| PMS/AIF | 3/3 | 90.3 | 67% | 33% | 33% |
| KRA | 3/4 | 90.7 | 33% | 0% | 0% |
| Depository | 2/2 | 91.5 | 50% | 50% | 0% |
| Clearing Corporation | 1/2 | 94 | 0% | 0% | 0% |
| Investment Platform | 3/3 | 94.3 | 33% | 33% | 0% |
| RTA | 2/2 | 97 | 0% | 0% | 0% |
| Stock Exchange | 1/4 | 100 | 0% | 0% | 0% |
Categories with fewer than five sites are shown for completeness but are too small to rank. The worst individual scores belonged to Franklin Templeton MF (72), Sharekhan (73), Sundaram MF (74), UTI Mutual Fund (74), SBI Mutual Fund (75).
What the audits will find
We mapped every finding to WCAG success criteria. The rows flagged IS 17802 core map to the criteria at the heart of India’s accessibility standard, which adopts WCAG at Level AA.
Failures by WCAG success criterion
Share of scored sites with at least one failure under each criterion.
| Success criterion | Sites affected | Occurrences |
|---|---|---|
| 1.4.3Contrast (Minimum)IS 17802 core | 75% | 575 |
| 4.1.2Name, Role, ValueIS 17802 core | 49% | 169 |
| 2.4.4Link Purpose (In Context) | 39% | 156 |
| 1.1.1Non-text ContentIS 17802 core | 34% | 156 |
| 1.4.10Reflow | 25% | 15 |
| 2.4.1Bypass Blocks | 25% | 15 |
| 2.4.7Focus VisibleIS 17802 core | 23% | 286 |
| 1.3.1Info and RelationshipsIS 17802 core | 23% | 60 |
| 2.1.1KeyboardIS 17802 core | 23% | 63 |
| 1.4.4Resize Text | 18% | 12 |
What is actually broken
The ten most common failures, by share of scored sites where each appeared at least once.
| Issue | Severity | Sites |
|---|---|---|
| Insufficient text color contrastColor & Visual Accessibility | Serious | 75% |
| Content outside landmarksStructure & Semantics | Moderate | 59% |
| Skipped heading levelsStructure & Semantics | Moderate | 44% |
| Links with no accessible nameNavigation | Critical | 39% |
| Images missing alt textImages & Media | Moderate | 33% |
| Missing main landmarkStructure & Semantics | Moderate | 31% |
| Duplicate landmarksStructure & Semantics | Moderate | 28% |
| Buttons with no accessible nameInteractive Controls | Critical | 26% |
| No level-one headingStructure & Semantics | Moderate | 25% |
| Content breaks at mobile zoom (reflow)Layout & Reflow | Serious | 25% |
The ten lowest scores
Every entity below carries multiple critical barriers on its homepage.
| Entity | Category | Score | Critical | Serious |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Franklin Templeton MF | AMC / Mutual Fund | 72 | 4 | 5 |
| Sharekhan | Stock Broker | 73 | 3 | 6 |
| Sundaram MF | AMC / Mutual Fund | 74 | 4 | 5 |
| UTI Mutual Fund | AMC / Mutual Fund | 74 | 4 | 3 |
| SBI Mutual Fund | AMC / Mutual Fund | 75 | 4 | 3 |
| CARE Ratings | Credit Rating Agency | 76 | 3 | 6 |
| IIFL Securities | Stock Broker | 76 | 4 | 7 |
| ICRA | Credit Rating Agency | 79 | 3 | 2 |
| Mirae Asset MF | AMC / Mutual Fund | 79 | 4 | 2 |
| Fisdom | Wealth Management | 80 | 2 | 5 |
What this means for the 31 July deadline
- The audit phase did not translate into remediation. Audits were due 30 April 2026. Ten weeks later, 61% of scored entities still carry homepage-level critical barriers that any competent audit would have flagged on page one.
- Size is no predictor of readiness. The country’s largest fund house scored 75. Its largest RTA scored 100. The difference is not budget; it is engineering priority.
- Verifiability is part of compliance. An annual audit-and-report regime assumes sites can be audited. 15.3% of this list currently cannot be, from the outside, including the two exchanges at the centre of the market.
- A high score is not conformance. Automated and scripted keyboard analysis catches a substantial but partial subset of WCAG. Issues needing human judgment, meaningful alt text, logical reading order, plain-language content, sit on top of these numbers, so the true barrier count is higher than reported here.
Facing the SEBI deadline? See where your site stands
Run the same WCAG 2.2 plus keyboard scan we used for this benchmark, free and with no signup, and see your score, your critical barriers, and exactly what to fix first.
Scan your site freeMethodology
We scanned the homepages of 72 SEBI-regulated Indian financial websites in July 2026: stock exchanges, depositories, clearing corporations, stock brokers, asset management companies, RTAs, KRAs, mutual fund platforms, credit rating agencies, investment platforms, PMS/AIF managers, and wealth platforms. Every site was scanned with the AccessLumens engine (SWBS-1.3 scoring) under identical configuration: WCAG 2.2 Level AA criteria (axe-core plus custom rules) with scripted keyboard analysis (focus traps, focus visibility, reachability, skip links, non-text contrast). Sites that blocked the scan with bot protection or robots.txt directives (5) were logged as blocked, and sites whose homepages never rendered usable content for a headless browser (6) as unreachable; both are excluded from scored averages but included in reachability statistics, leaving 61 scored sites. We enforced strict robots.txt compliance throughout. India’s IS 17802 standard adopts WCAG at Level AA; our engine tests WCAG 2.2 AA, so failures reported here are failures against the Indian standard’s baseline as well. Scores use our SWBS model; this is a homepage-level diagnostic snapshot, not a legal conformance determination (see our disclaimer). All scans were conducted without coordination with, or advance notice to, the entities scanned. For the raw dataset, contact support@accesslumens.com.