Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority (TDRA)

(TDRA) Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority sets digital accessibility policy for the United Arab Emirates. A policy states the obligation. It does not tell a developer what to write, a designer what to specify or a tester what to fail a service for.

We authored the UAE A11y Code: a single reference every federal entity, and every supplier working for one, can design, build and test against. It was delivered in Arabic and English, and it reaches past websites to the platforms public services actually run on.

“Headings must convey structure” tells a team what to want. It does not tell them what to do, and it gives two testers no way to agree on whether a service has done it.

Every requirement is written as a testable specification, expressed once for each platform, and graded: what must be done to conform, what should be done, and what is preferred. The grading is the part that scales — it is what lets a tester in one entity and a tester in another reach the same severity for the same failure.

Guidance in English alone reaches a fraction of the people who have to apply it. Alongside the framework we produced an Arabic version of WCAG 2.2 as an unofficial translation, which is the honest description: the W3C operates a separate process for authorised translations, and this does not claim to be one.

It prioritises clarity over literal rendering, and it was reviewed by translators who work in technical documentation and know accessibility, rather than by general translators alone. A criterion that is technically accurate and unreadable has not been translated.

It uses the UAE Design System, so it reads as part of the national platform rather than a document attached to it.

Guidance only counts where people act on it. A11y Lens sits in a federal entity’s own website, reports a page against WCAG 2.2 Level AA, and points at the part of the Code that answers the issue in hand. Scores feed the national dashboard; the findings stay with the entity that owns the service.

The widget itself conforms to WCAG 2.2 Level AA and works in Arabic and English. A checker that is not accessible has no standing to report on anything else.

Authoring national guidance draws on the same disciplines as the rest of our work: the criteria applied in an تدقيق إمكانية الوصول, the component-level judgement of an مراجعة التصميم الشامل, the structure work behind document accessibility, and the ownership and reporting that strategy and governance puts in place.

It also draws on إمكانية الوصول بالعربية throughout. A framework written in English and translated afterwards reads as a translation; this one was built to be read in both languages by the people who have to apply it.