Universal Acceptance Day: AUU, ICANN collaborate to foster use of local languages on internet

By Chioma Obinagwam

The Association of African Universities’ (AAU’s) and Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), have partnered to create awareness about the need for use of local languages on the internet.

Confiance News gathered from a statement issued by Communications Assistant at AAU, Naomi Darko on Sunday.

“The celebration, organised jointly by the AAU and the ICANN was to create awareness about UA which is working towards the use of local languages and scripts on the internet as a prelude to the launch of the Universal Acceptance Readiness project,” the statement disclosed.

She stated that one of the ways to achieve the objective is to ensure sustainability of its Universal Acceptance (UA) programmes.

Reacting to the statement, the secretary general of the AAU, Professor Olusola Oyewole, said, “AAU’s strategic priorities are to promote a favourable policy environment, strengthen institutional capacity of stakeholders, harmonize standardization for competitiveness, collaborate as well as mobilize resources to help sustain its programmes.”

Precisely, in a speech read on his behalf at the maiden edition of Universal Acceptance (UA) Day celebrations, in the Ghanaian capital, Accra, by director of ICT services, communications, and knowledge management at the AAU, Ms. Nodumo Dhlamini, he said as an institution, the AAU’s  vision is the lead advocate for higher education on the African continent.

Confiance News also learnt that UA generally supports the ability for email mailbox names to use characters in local languages and scripts through Email Address Internationalization (EAI) standards.

Themed, “Universal Acceptance (UA) and What it Means”, it provided an opportunity for participants to be educated on its meaning and how it will ensure that, email addresses and all valid domain names, including long new top-level domains like .org, .net, .com, and .info which are part of Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), can be used by all internet-enabled applications, devices, and systems regardless of script, language and character length.

Professor Oyewole  reiterated  the partnership between ICANN and the AAU and other organisations that launched the Coalition for Digital Africa Initiative  that was established in December at  the Internet Governance Forum” in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

He explained the concept of UA and the need for its adoption at the various higher education institutions and expressed excitement  about the participation of students at the event, because they will go into the industry after school as champions of UA principles.

The Senior IT Officer at the AAU, Mr. Abednego Corletey, said, “through Universal Acceptance, all those who develop, provide or manage online websites and applications will have the opportunity to enable users globally to experience the social and economic power of the internet through making their systems universally compliant”.

Mr. Corletey engaged participants in hands-on tasks through case studies and the self-verification of the compliance of their institutional websites using the EAI checker.

The statement further showed that comments and recommendations were made by some of the 48 representatives from various stakeholder institutions in Ghana who participated physically at the Secretariat and over 150 participants who connected via the AAU Zoom Platform.

Among other things they called for collaboration between the AAU and the Ghana Tertiary Education Commission (GTEC) toward the incorporation of the Universal Acceptance concepts in the IT Curriculum in Ghana.

In addition, they asked the AAU to work with various institutes of languages such as the Ghana Institute of Languages to sensitize the public on the use of scripts in local languages, an extension of UA Day outreach to other parts of the continent, and the introduction of UA on assistive technologies for the visually impaired.

It was attended by stakeholders from the African Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) participating both physically at the AAU Secretariat in Accra and virtually via the AU Zoom platform.
They included, Vice Chancellors, Rectors, Deans and Heads of Departments, Technical staff, lecturers, and students of various HEIs on the continent.

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