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UA Day 2026

25 March - 30 May 2026

The fourth annual UA Day to be celebrated between 25 March and 30 May 2026, with numerous local, national, and regional events with an emphasis on UA adoption.

Join the international multilingual Internet community in building a truly global, multilingual #Internet4All

First introduced in 2023, Universal Acceptance (UA) Day is an opportunity to mobilize local, national, regional, and global communities and organizations to champion UA on a global scale. UA is a technical best practice that ensures all valid domain names and email addresses, regardless of script, language or character length, can be equally used by all Internet-enabled applications, devices, and systems.

As in past years, UA Day 2026 events will consist of a mix of in-person, virtual, and hybrid sessions held by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), global partners, and regional and local organizations.

ICANN and UNESCO have been collaborating on UA Day since 2025, following a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to enable access to multilingual Internet worldwide.

UNESCO leverages its global presence to advocate for UA as a key enabler of a multilingual Internet, contributing to awareness-raising, policy guidance, and the sharing of best practices with Member States and stakeholders. Through this partnership, UNESCO emphasizes the importance of Universal Acceptance in ensuring that all domain names and email addresses, regardless of script, language, or character length, can be equally used across all Internet-enabled applications, devices, and systems. This collaboration reinforces UNESCO's commitment to fostering an inclusive, equitable, and culturally diverse digital world, building on the UNESCO 2003 Recommendation concerning the Promotion and Use of Multilingualism and Universal Access to Cyberspace, the International Decade of Indigenous Languages (IDIL 2022–2032), and the broader framework of the Global Digital Compact.

Join UA Day 2026 Events!

Join us from March 25 to May 30, 2026, for a series of events celebrating Universal Acceptance across the world. The events will consist of UA awareness, academic curriculum, adoption and strategy sessions. Participate online or in person to learn about how you can shape the future of the Internet that is multilingual, inclusive and diverse.

See the schedule of UA Day 2026 events here.

UA Day Materials

If you are hosting a UA Day event, presentation materials, logos, and key resources are available below.

Videos:

  • Welcome Videos:
    • Tripti Sinha, Chair of the ICANN Board (EN)
    • Kurtis Lindqvist, President and CEO of the ICANN (EN)
    • Guilherme Canela, Director of Division for Digital Inclusion and Policies and Digital Transformation of UNESCO (EN, ES, FR, PT)
  • Other UA Videos: Introduction to Universal Acceptance (AR, FR, EN, ES, PT, TH, ZU)

Presentation Materials: Please find the relevant slide decks available for download in the table below.

Demo Training Materials and Recordings

Other Materials:

Duration of
Event		 Suggested Agenda & Materials

One-hour or Two-hour UA Day Awareness Event

Half-Day UA Day Awareness Event

Half-Day UA Day Academic Curricula Event

One-Day UA Day Adoption and Demonstration Event

Half-Day UA Day Strategy Review Event
  • Strategy to promote adoption of UA nationally and regionally

See the call for UA Day 2026 proposals here.

Discover more about past UA Day events on this page.

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."