Domain name expansion, EAI compliance, and more

Addressing Universal Acceptance issues is important to the Digital India initiative of the Modi government in India and the country’s IT sector is making notable progress.

Domain name expansion

NIXI, the operator of the Indian ccTLD (.in) has already launched .bhart (.भारत) in 15 indian languages and also has plans to launch .भारत in all 22 of the official languages of India.   Providing domain names to the community in their native scripts is important in a country which such  diverse language communities.

EAI compliance

In 2016, Xgenplus launched a fully compliant EAI (Email Address Internationalisation) service that allows email addresses in any language.  Besides  the languages and scripts of India, Xgenplus is pursuing additional overseas markets such as the Middle-East and Russia by providing services in Arabic, Russian and more.  Xgenplus provides not only a web-based e-mail service, but also supports Android and iOS-based client applications.

To help other companies determine if their systems are EAI ready, Xgenplus also created a free EAI tool. By simply entering an email address on the site, the tool allows email users and administrators to check their SMTP/IMAP servers for EAI readiness. It also creates connections to the target email server and reports back on EAI compliance.

The Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), a trade association of local and global digital service providers, is also actively raising awareness of UA and EAI within the Indian software community.  They are planning a series of regional Hackathons, one in each major language community, to introduce UA and EAI issues to the local developer community and initiate working code.

Zensar, a leading software outsourcing company, is actively building their UA experience by providing UA remediation efforts to their international clients.  Zensar is also publishing a free utility that companies will be able to use to get an initial assessment of how UA ready their customer-facing services are.

India’s IT community are well known to collaborate for the greater good. NIXI, the Government, trade associations (like IAMAI) and enterprises large and small are working together to address UA and EAI issues for the greater goal of a digitally enabled India.