Transcript of Minister Josephine Teo's Opening Address at Inclusive Design Week 2025

Good morning, and a warm welcome to all colleagues and friends. I’m happy to join you for GovTech’s Inclusive Design Week.

Inclusivity, as a value, ought to be upheld in our society, and it is something that we want to achieve as part of our Smart Nation. Last year when we refreshed our Smart Nation strategy, we outlined the vision it was intended to achieve – we would like Singapore to offer “A Thriving Digital Future for All”. In many ways, the foundations for digital inclusion have been built quite well in Singapore.

For example, compared to countries with more varied geographies, our compact city is much more wired-up. Some of you have heard me say this when I meet with my international counterparts – Indonesia has 17,000 islands, Brazil has 8.5 billion square kilometres, and we are all around 720 square kilometres. Achieving 3G connectivity is a challenge for them.

When I met with my colleague from India, he was trying to push the country towards 5G connectivity and he told me, I still have another 26,000 villages to cover. When we think about this, we are in a much more fortunate position, because of the compactness of our size.

As a result, we can get internet access almost everywhere. In fact, 98% of households in Singapore have broadband access. This is even as around 2.5 billion people in the world have no internet access. It is not always easy for countries to even make a case to achieve this. For example, many of my colleagues in less developed countries, they are challenged by their citizens, “we do not have good sanitation so why tell us about internet access?” This is the reality.

We know, however, that even with such good access in Singapore, cost can be an issue.

1. Since 2023, the government has supported over 20,000 low-income households through the DigitalAccess@Home scheme. It provides them with subsidised broadband access, or both broadband and a computing device.

2. Since 2020, the Mobile Access for Seniors scheme has also provided over 15,000 packages of mobile plans, or both mobile plans and subsidised smartphones to low-income seniors. We have gone beyond just internet access. We have accepted the fact that if you do not have a good device, even with connectivity, you cannot do very much.

To ensure that their internet access is put to good use, we established the SG Digital Office, which provides in-person support for vulnerable groups such as seniors to pick up the basic digital skills required to go online safely. For example, what can they do to protect themselves against cybersecurity risks.

We want them to have internet access, the devices that can support a whole range of services, and the skills to be able to use them. These are some of the things we have put in place.

With these measures already introduced, many of my international counterparts are sometimes surprised that there’s more that we want to do. They ask curiously, “What else are you seeking to achieve in terms of digital inclusion?”

We know the digital world is not easy to navigate for everyone. As in the physical world, the digital environment is designed with certain assumptions in mind. These assumptions include what most people can see, hear, or do. But for persons with special needs, it is hard to experience the same benefits that most of us do when using digital products and services.

Take Ms Jasmine Yau, for example. Ms Yau has spinal muscular dystrophy. To interact with digital platforms, she uses the gaze of her eyes instead of her hand and a mouse. But simple tasks, such as submitting forms, or moving between pages can be confusing and frustrating when the screen does not show clear visual cues. Or in some cases, the platform may not be designed to respond well to her gaze.

In fact, missing accessibility features can affect anyone – our grandparents, our parents and even our future selves. I, myself, sometimes find visibility an issue. As we age, we will not see as well as before and will appreciate features like enlarged text or screen magnifiers to navigate websites.

Our goal is therefore to have digital products and services be inclusive by design, so that users like Ms Yau and our seniors can also enjoy a degree of independence and ease when they go online. They can certainly ask others to help them, but I think all of us would prefer to have a choice to be able to do it ourselves without asking for help. This is a mission GovTech firmly believes in.

This is why GovTech developed Oobee as a practical tool to help any business owner or development team identify and fix accessibility issues in their websites. I remember speaking with the team about two years ago and I asked them how we could do this quicker. They told me that one bottleneck they faced was that many designers and developers did not even know that they face accessibility issues. They were not aware of it. If we wanted people to gain awareness, we must build a tool to enable us to do this at scale. Oobee was a tool they developed as a practical response to a problem building wide scale and widespread awareness.

1. I’m very happy to say that Oobee has been used by several government agencies to improve the accessibility of their websites. They include MOE, MOM, SportSG, and NEA.

2. Oobee’s reach also extends beyond Singapore. It has been listed on the Digital Public Goods Registry, a platform by the UN-endorsed Digital Public Goods Alliance that promotes open-source technologies advancing Sustainable Development Goals.

3. In the last month alone, Oobee was used by government agencies to scan over 900 websites. On average, it flagged over 500 problematic HTML components, 150 missing alternate texts and 170 colour contrast issues per scan. You can just imagine how every single one of these would be a touch point that a person with visual impairment would have found extremely frustrating. Addressing these issues will enable users requiring assistive technologies to have a better digital experience.

GovTech, in consultation with industry partners, will also be updating the Digital Service Standards (DSS) to provide clearer guidance on making key government services accessible to all users. This includes ensuring that digital content can be accurately identified and read by assistive technologies. The revised DSS is slated for launch later this year.

Besides setting standards, we need to be deliberate in considering accessibility upfront and not as an afterthought. Too often, accessibility is addressed late in the development cycle, making it more costly and time-consuming to rectify.

Therefore, GovTech is launching a public website called the A11y Playground. The website includes curated resources and interactive elements. The Empathy Playground Game, for example, offers a glimpse into how persons with disabilities experience digital content. With a better understanding of diverse user needs, accessibility can be built into the design process from the very start.

In the longer term, accessibility must be woven into our developer culture. We cannot speak for everyone in the world but the developer culture in Singapore is a good place for us to start. The key to making a lasting impact lies in creating a sustained movement to champion inclusive digital design. I have challenged my MDDI colleagues to become best-in-class developers as we work to realise our Smart Nation vision. This will require us to lead by example in embedding accessibility into our products and services early, and partner with and bring others along.

In closing, I thank you all for being a part of Inclusive Design Week. It is important that we bring together designers, developers, policy makers, persons with disabilities, and seniors, to hear directly from each other. It will help all of us bring about meaningful improvements in our digital ecosystem. Naturally, we hope the conversations do not stop here. MDDI will be launching a workgroup with like-minded partners from the public, private, and people sectors in early 2026 to co-create initiatives to make digital services more user-friendly.

Inclusive digital design is about more than just lines of code. It represents our shared commitment to building an equitable, thriving digital Singapore for all. On that note, I want to give a shoutout to some friends from the special needs community for joining us today, and for suggesting to be part of the developmental process. We are excited to see how we can take it along. I wish you engaging and meaningful discussions in the days ahead. Thank you.