DICT Memorandum Circular 2017-004 — The Philippine Web Accessibility Policy

Signed 9 June 2017 by DICT Secretary Rodolfo Salalima, Memorandum Circular No. 2017-004 adopts ISO/IEC 40500:2012 (W3C's WCAG 2.0) as the Philippine Web Accessibility Policy. It binds national departments, Congress, the judiciary, state universities and colleges, government financial institutions, GOCCs and local government units; requires accessible e-forms, alt-text, accessible PDFs, and captioning/sign-language interpretation; and is rooted in the 1992 Magna Carta for Persons with Disabilities (RA 7277), with a two-year transition period and a DICT/NCDA technical working group to monitor conformance.

A 2025 peer-reviewed study (MDPI Informatics, Bokingkito et al.) combined automated and manual testing across national agency websites, finding web-accessibility compliance ranging 28.00%–82.67% (average 53.43%), versus higher general-usability compliance (62.32%–97.10%, average 82.50%) — showing accessibility specifically lags behind usability. Better-performing agencies included the Department of Trade and Industry, the Commission on Higher Education, the Department of Justice, the Department of Labor and Employment, and the Department of Environment and Natural Resources.

A commonly cited 2018 baseline of 0% WCAG compliance could not be traced to a primary report and should be treated as weakly sourced; the 2025 MDPI paper's exact figures were drawn from indexed abstracts/summaries (direct fetch returned HTTP 403) and should be re-verified against the open-access PDF before further reliance.

Read the full analysis: https://www.pwag.org/2017/06/philippines-adopt-wcag-2-0/