the project as due to changes in the political landscape. Training the legislators may have been redundant due to the impending change in Cabinet portfolios; getting the attention of other government officials during this period was a challenge given the rapid changes in the political landscape. In the second year of the project, once the new Cabinet was appointed, a course on social media and egovernment for 20 members of Union Parliament was being organized. During this, a request came from members of the Yangon Regional Parliament to conduct a similar training for their entire parliament, and offered their parliamentary premises as a venue. Funds still remain due to cost savings from organizing the courses (due to savings on the venue primarily). The interest of the members of the Yangon Regional Parliament was high and requested follow up courses, particularly for other government officials. Hence, another course is being conceptualized/organized on the use of data for policy for government officials. 4.3 Policy intervention 4.3.1 Catalyzing ICT access for the disabled community Myanmar’s 2014 national census revealed that 4.6 percent of the population of Myanmar lived with disabilities; 16 2.5 percent of the population was visually impaired. Access to ICTs for this segment of the population is problematic. LIRNEasia’s objective is to step in order to catalyze the rate at which they gain access to ICTs, particularly the Internet. Following meetings with multiple stakeholders in February 2016, a number of problems in accessibility of ICTs for the disabled were identified. LIRNEasia wrote to two operators suggesting that an action plan was drawn up promote accessibility by the disabled such as providing billing and other information in accessible formats and ensuring that the website is WCAG 2.0 compliant. Further progress on this was not made due the lack of engagement from the operators. During this visit it was also learnt that technical problems exist in converting devices such as electronic book readers (eg: DAISY readers) into the Myanmar language, though the root cause was unclear. A leading figure in resolving technical issues, Mr. Dipendra Manocha was invited to Myanmar to scope out the existing situation and identify the bottlenecks preventing the text to speech engine (TTS) from working optimally. Further details on his meetings, findings and work can be seen in section 5.4.2 and Annex 16. Plans were alos underway to organize a hackathon to develop applications for the disabled. However, subsequently, it was learnt that other parties in Myanmar were planning to run similar programmes. Instead, the focus was shifted towards working with content providers such as 7day news in developing applications in the Unicode font, which could be read by screen reading software needed for the text-to-speech engine to work. 4.4 Myanmar advisory board The contract imposed that LIRNEasia should form a project advisory board for this project to evaluate its work and provide suggestions for further work. Dr Robert Anderson, professor of communication (at Simon Fraser University, Canada) and trained, director of the program on Development and Sustainability, and who has worked in Myanmar for decades and is currently building a network of young environmentalists in Myanmar agreed to chair this board. The board members are, 1. Dr. Robert Anderson- Simon Fraser University, Canada 2. Dr. Thant Thaw Kuang- Myanmar Book Aid and Preservation Foundation 16 http://data.unhcr.org/thailand/download.php?id=421