The accessibility gap: How poor publishing practices undermine African legal systems

Across international forums, African governments and institutions repeatedly raise a legitimate concern: global digital systems do not reflect African realities. Our languages are underrepresented. Our legal systems are marginal in training datasets. Our regulatory approaches are poorly understood by automated tools.

We speak about bias in artificial intelligence. We speak about exclusion from global platforms. We speak about digital inequality.

But there is an uncomfortable truth that requires equal attention.

Some of that exclusion is being reproduced by our own publication practices.

In 2025, the South African Human Rights Commission began examining the format in which government notices are published by Government Printing Works under the Department of Home Affairs. The issue at first glance appeared technical. Notices were publicly available. They were uploaded. They were officially issued.

Yet, when tested, many of these notices were found to be image-only scans rather than digitally generated text. In several cases, the scans were skewed, distorted or degraded in quality. Text could not be selected or copied. Screen-reading software could not interpret the content. Optical character recognition tools struggled to extract usable text.

For a blind or visually impaired person, this meant independent access to the law was compromised. For digital systems that rely on structured and machine-readable text, it meant the content was effectively invisible.

If African public documents are published in formats that cannot be easily read by machines, they are far less likely to be indexed, scraped, analysed or incorporated into the datasets that shape global digital systems. When our legal material is difficult to process, it is less likely to be present in training data. When it is absent from training data, it is absent from the knowledge base of emerging technologies.

Data bias does not begin only in Silicon Valley, it sits at the point of publication.

This matters for constitutional reasons and for strategic ones.

South Africa’s Constitution guarantees equality, dignity and access to information. The Promotion of Access to Information Act gives effect to the right of access to information held by the state. South Africa is party to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which requires that information intended for the general public be provided in accessible formats.

Thus when government notices are published in formats that screen-reading technologies cannot interpret, blind and visually impaired persons are denied independent access to public information. Accessibility is not a courtesy. It is a legal obligation.

At the same time, machine readability has become a structural condition of participation in the digital age. Legal research tools, compliance platforms, language models and search systems rely on structured and extractable text. If African legal materials are not consistently published in machine-readable formats, they are structurally disadvantaged in digital ecosystems.

The Human Rights Commission therefore undertook a practical investigation. Notices were tested for extractability, searchability and compatibility with assistive technologies. The results revealed systemic weaknesses in formatting and quality control. In December 2025, the commission addressed a formal letter to the minister of home affairs as the executive authority responsible for the Government Printing Works. The letter set out the constitutional and international legal obligations relating to accessibility and access to information. It described the technical deficiencies identified during testing and recommended that government notices be published in digitally generated, text-based formats that comply with accessibility standards and allow full machine readability.

The commission emphasised that digital publication practices must reflect equality principles and that accessible data strengthens both disability rights and democratic participation. It further noted that ensuring proper formatting and tagging of documents would enable compatibility with assistive technologies while also improving searchability and integration into digital systems.

In January 2026, the minister responded constructively. The department committed to reviewing publication processes within the Government Printing Works, to implementing technical adjustments to ensure that future notices are published in machine-readable formats, and to strengthening quality assurance measures to prevent the publication of distorted or non-searchable documents. The department acknowledged that accessibility forms part of responsible governance in a digital era.

The commission welcomes this commitment and will monitor implementation to ensure that practice aligns with principle.

This intervention reflects a broader shift in how national human rights institutions must operate. Digital rights are not a separate category of rights. They intersect with equality, access to information, socioeconomic rights and administrative justice. The architecture of digital systems now shapes the practical realisation of constitutional guarantees.

The commission has increasingly integrated digital rights into its mandate, recognising that the quality of digital infrastructure and publication practices directly affects the enjoyment of rights. Addressing inaccessible government notices is not a technical exercise. It is part of ensuring that constitutional promises are meaningful in contemporary systems.

It is also part of a continental conversation.

Across Africa, national human rights institutions raise concerns about global data bias and technological marginalisation. That advocacy remains essential. However, we must also ensure that our own public information ecosystems do not inadvertently entrench the very exclusion we critique.

Making African legal and regulatory material consistently machine readable is a practical and achievable reform. It enhances transparency. It strengthens disability inclusion. It supports researchers, journalists and innovators. It increases the likelihood that African perspectives are represented in digital knowledge systems.

The commission intends to share this approach with partner national human rights institutions across the region. Strengthening digital accessibility standards in public publication is a concrete step that can be replicated. It does not require large-scale legislative reform. It requires alignment between constitutional principles and technical implementation.

Africa’s participation in the digital future will depend not only on connectivity and innovation but also on the integrity and accessibility of our public data.

When we call for fairness in global platforms, we must also ensure that our own information systems are structured in ways that make our knowledge visible and usable.

Ensuring that the law can be read by persons with disabilities is a matter of dignity and equality. Ensuring that the law can be processed by digital systems is a matter of representation and long-term influence.

Accessible, machine-readable public information is foundational infrastructure in the digital age. It is a rights issue. It is a governance issue. And it is a step towards ensuring that African legal frameworks are present, searchable and recognised in the evolving architecture of global knowledge. DM

Nomahlubi Khwinana is a commissioner at the South African Human Rights Commission. She is responsible for the civil and political rights, children and justice focal areas. Dr Eileen Carter is the provincial manager for the Eastern Cape Office of the South African Human Rights Commission and the commission’s national coordinator on human rights and developing technologies. She also serves on an international expert group shaping the Copenhagen Principles on online harms.