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Universal Acceptance Readiness Evaluations

The Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG), ICANN, and industry experts regularly conduct studies to measure the progress of UA-readiness across various platforms including applications, browsers, email systems, websites, and more. These studies are carried out to identify, measure, and subsequently mitigate UA gaps in various platforms. Continuing to address these gaps requires involvement of programmers, business managers, academics, and more.

To get involved, learn how to become UA-ready.

Global UA-Readiness

The UA-Readiness Report 2021-2022 provides an overview of UA-readiness around the world.

ICANN has developed and deployed the EAI support survey tool, which looks at all mail exchanger (MX) servers of second level domain names across generic top-level domains (gTLDs), and share what percentage of these support Email Address Internationalization (EAI).

Below is the table demonstrating the summary of the quarterly survey results measuring the EAI readiness of all email servers listed in the gTLD zones.

If you want to test EAI Readiness of your TLD zone, the code which tests the zones is available at https://github.com/icann/eai-survey-tool.

Email Address Internationalization (EAI) support survey results for gTLD zones globally

UA-Readiness of Registry and Registrar Systems

To assess the UA-readiness of the systems of ICANN's contracted parties (gTLD registry operators (RO) and registrars), registry service providers (RSPs), and country-code top-level domains (ccTLD), ICANN org conducted the following surveys. The objective was to create a baseline, to understand the challenges for becoming UA-ready and to understand how ICANN org can contribute.

ICANN published a study on The Universal Acceptance (UA) Roadmap for Domain Name Registry and Registrar Systems, which proposes how to test these systems for UA-readiness, for the benefit of TLD registries and registrars. The study includes the roadmap in addition to the results of testing a registry system and a registrar system in the appendices.

UA-Readiness Evaluations

The UASG has conducted numerous UA-readiness evaluations of platforms and software applications. The current data suggests that there is progress being made but there are still gaps that need to be addressed by the technical community. View a full inventory of evaluations.

UA and EAI Resources

For a full list of UA and EAI resources, including facts sheets, FAQs, best practices, and more, visit https://uasg.tech/document-hub/.

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Domain Name System
Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."