Starting December 2015, the Internet Society Asia-Pacific (ISOC APAC) Bureau in collaboration with local stakeholders including government, industry and the civil society, has led a series of endeavours to help further digital accessibility in Pakistan.

Building on the success of our work in Pakistan, and in an effort to replicate the learnings in other parts of the Asia-Pacific, we recently held a workshop on digital accessibility in Colombo, Sri Lanka, hosted by the ISOC Sri Lanka chapter.

The year 2016 was indeed a successful year for the Internet Society (ISOC) Asia-Pacific (APAC) Team. We were able to leverage many opportunities throughout the year across the region, and together with our members, chapters and partners, we worked towards ensuring that the Internet kept growing and evolving.

For me personally, there were a couple of things that stood out. One was InterCommunity 2016 where we had 11 nodes located throughout the region engaged in robust intra-regional discussions on topical issues.

If we had to choose music to accompany all our activities at APRICOT 2017 it would surely be Chopin’s Minute Waltz (Op 64, No 1)! No, we did not manage to fit 138 bars of music into 60 seconds but the tempo was very lively with frequent crescendos and diminuendos and a lengthy trill. Call it efficiency, but we all managed to share and exchange a lot of information working within the new shortened APRICOT 2017/APNIC 43 programme.   

After a long wait of 4.5 years, the 29th edition of SANOG came back to Pakistan, this time in the countrys capital, Islamabad. The Pakistan Telecom Authority (PTA) and the Higher Education commission of Pakistan (HEC) came forward to jointly host the event at the HEC headquarters.

SANOG 29 consisted of two days of conference, one day of tutorial alongside the Internet Society's ION Conference, and the usual five days of workshops with three parallel tracks. Eight days of action-packed agenda was good enough to attract a lot of audiences.

The United Nations estimates that one in six people (in Asia and the Pacific) live with disability – that is a total of 650 million people. Persons with Disabilities (PWDs) often face barriers that restrict them from participating in society on an equal basis, including the access to, and use of, information and communication technologies (ICTs).