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OBJECTIVES/GOALS
To enjoin all government agencies to implement accessible website design in accordance with the technical guidelines
set forth under Section 2 of this Joint Circular.
KEY F EATURES (W ITH ADDITIONS FROM THE ZERO P ROJECT TEAM)
The Accessible Web Design Guidelines Joint Circular No. 1, series of 2010 is to be classified as a national legally binding
regulatory policy . The Circular sets out that:
1. All Government’s websites of its departments, institutions and instrumentalities have to be in accordance with
Section 2’s technical guidelines, as recommended by the Web Design Accessibility Recommendation (WDAR)
Checkpoints of the PWAG. Section 2 guidelines comprise different maturity stages: Maturity Stage 1 that consists of
7 check points, as embodied in the Manila ICT Design Recommendations. Maturity Stage 2 that consists of 12 check
points, as recommended by the Philippine Web Accessibility Group (PWAG).
2. The Circular’s Section 3 empowers the National Council for Disability Affairs to conduct training for all duly
designated webmasters and its Section 4 rules that relevant expenses have to be covered from the one percent
allocation for persons with disabilities and the senior citizens as provided by the General Appropriations Act (GAA).
3. The Circular also empowers the NCDA and NCC to, jointly or separately, issue other rules and regulations as maybe
necessary to effect the objectives of this Joint Circular.
4. Implementation: The lack of knowledge about accessibility and the skill on how to make website accessible
according to the policy’s guidelines were addressed through series of training and workshops. The Philippine Web
Accessibility Group, an independent non-government organization composed of Filipino web masters, helps
monitoring which government agency is accessible and which is not.
INNOVATION
The policy is a strategy to make government offices aware of the necessity of making government websites accessible
and provides them a clear cut guidelines that web designers can easily follow to first provide reasonable
accommodation without drastically changing their websites which entails a lot of costs. Second, web designers has the
option to scale up and eventually adopt the international standard set defined for example by W3C, without pressure.
FACTS ON O UTPUT (WITH ADDITIONS FROM THE ZERO PROJECT TEAM)
1. A total of 27 Web Accessibility Trainings have been conducted nationwide by PWAG since 2007.
2. Approximately 300 Webmasters/Web Content Managers have been trained on the Circular’s guidelines.
3. Government agencies have been slowly responding to the joint circular. As of July 2015, a total of 11 Philippine
Government Websites and 8 .ph Websites placed accessible features on their sites (although they are not yet
officially validated as accessible using PWAG’s Web Design Accessibility Recommendations).
4. 31 sites were awarded as "Disabled Friendly Websites".