Speeches
Welcome Address by Minister Josephine Teo at GovTech's Inclusive Design Week
21 October 2026
Senior Minister of State, Jasmin Lau,
Colleagues and friends,
Good morning, everyone. I’m happy to be here and to see colleagues and friends from Government, industry, Institutes of Higher Learning, and community organisations.
Last week, despite the haze, the Singapore International Cyber Week took place with a record turnout of over 15,000 participants from more than 100 countries. During our bilateral meetings, some countries asked Singapore if we could help with capacity building. One country was only beginning to establish broadband connectivity, and was laying its first set of subsea cables to improve its connectivity with the rest of the world. Another sought to raise the level of digital public service delivery. Its representatives were very interested to know that for some years now, more than 99% of the Government's interactions with citizens have been digitally enabled. All these countries were hoping for more of their citizens to benefit from digital technologies.
They remind me of the great unevenness in digital maturity among countries. We may all strive for digital inclusion, but with different focus, depending on our stage of digital development.
At earlier stages, digital inclusion is about making the internet and broadband accessible to the many and not the few. This is necessary but insufficient. To gain from digital access, people need smart yet affordable devices. They also need the skills to transact and use digital tools such as those readily available in app stores.
For Singapore, our ambition for digital inclusion must reach higher. Having achieved the basics of broadband and device access, we have focused on building skills, including for seniors and disadvantaged communities. But we must not stop there. We must instead do better to identify groups who still have difficulty getting the most out of digital technologies.
In other words, our vision of “A Thriving Digital Future for All” is truly realised when everyone can take part and benefit, regardless of age, ability or circumstance.
Often, this is a matter of design. Designers usually prioritise the needs of majority users. This is very natural. Inevitably, minority users find the design to be less friendly because it was never conceived or implemented from their perspective. In older housing estates, for example, wheelchair users are often frustrated. Fortunately, in recent years, there have been many projects that strive for barrier-free access through better design.
Accessible design can, in fact, help everyone. The same ramps that help wheelchair users are also welcomed by parents with children in strollers and shoppers with trolleys.
Similarly, in the digital domain, closed captions help those who are deaf or hard-of hearing. But we have all appreciated it at some point, such as when we need to watch a video in a noisy environment.
When I spoke at Inclusive Design Week last year, I emphasised that our digital services should be “inclusive by design” so that more of our citizens can use them independently and easily. I’m very glad that my colleagues have continued to put this into practice across Government.
One good illustration is in the area of language accessibility.
Like many others, Mr Jee Su Giam, one of our Smart Nation Ambassadors and Citizen Translators, observed that many seniors were literate only in their Mother Tongue. They therefore struggled with government information that is primarily provided in English.
In fact, the government had long recognised the need to improve language options but the trade-offs were always very significant. We knew that the quality would suffer noticeably if we pushed translations too widely. Many local references or nuances would be lost in translation. Sometimes, it could create embarrassing or even misleading instructions and misrepresentations.
Accordingly, we prioritised our limited translation resources to focus on high-impact digital services like SingPass, LifeSG, and CDC Vouchers. More recently, technology itself has advanced to allow efficient automated translation at scale.
We are therefore trying our best to ramp up such translation services promptly, while ensuring that we have proper localisation and quality control, including with human input.
GovTech and OGP have developed tools like EasyTranslate and Polyglot that translate government webpages into Chinese, Malay or Tamil while preserving the original webpage. These tools have been deployed to the portals of more agencies like REACH, which is within my ministry, and ICA, within my previous ministry.
Users like Ms Siti Raudah have since shared that “Reading the information in Bahasa Melayu using EasyTranslate made procedural terms easier to comprehend and made it easier to locate the resources (she) needed."
This is what we want inclusive design to achieve – digital services and digital services in other parts of the digital domain that work better for all Singaporeans, with agencies better equipped to make this happen.
Last year, we also refreshed our Digital Service Standards to raise the bar in making government digital services usable and accessible. Nonetheless, like other governments, we recognise that a service may tick all the right boxes and still be confusing or difficult to use.
In the UK, government digital services must not only meet the accessibility standards on paper. They must also be tested by persons with disabilities and older users. We are adopting a similar approach.
GovTech has started piloting a new approach to the Mystery Shopper Programme, where real users, including those with accessibility needs, complete government service journeys as they would in everyday life.
This will help us uncover barriers that our accessibility checks may miss and help agencies improve our services.
In the same spirit, we launched the inaugural Inclusive Design Challenge this year.
The Challenge invited teams from government agencies and Institutes of Higher Learning to engage with persons with disabilities, seniors and their caregivers to identify pain points they experienced across digital services and the physical environment.
Over two months, participants developed prototypes that they continually refined with user feedback.
One team of students from Temasek Polytechnic discovered that even when banking apps work with screen readers, digital payments are hard to use.
Users struggled with unclear navigation or had to listen to irrelevant content being read out loud.
The students proposed design principles for a more consistent experience across banking apps – such as reading important information first, announcing the status of a payment, and guiding users on what to do next.
These seemingly small design changes can make a significant difference. You'll be hearing from the team shortly. I want to also acknowledge that these students are just starting their polytechnic education, and it is remarkable as well as incredibly encouraging to see their ability to think about solutions to problems like this, and care enough to find a solution.
As we upskill our workforce for the age of AI, we should also help persons with disabilities keep up. Last week, we announced a new committee to review training programmes for persons with disabilities and ensure minimum standards for inclusive training. But in truth, no one benefits if these programmes are not well-attended. It is not a good use of resources for the trainers, and it would not meet the Government’s intent in trying to uplift as many communities as we can.
With that in mind, a team from SWDA went on a journey of discovery. They discovered that for wheelchair users, choosing a SkillsFuture course was not simply about what to learn. Other considerations include whether the training venue is easy to reach, and whether the course fees are affordable.
The team proposed changes to the MySkillsFuture portal, making wheelchair accessible courses easier to find, showing relevant funding support and allowing learners to indicate their accommodation needs.
Deeper understanding of the user journey also uncovered barriers that the portal alone could not solve – such as accessible travel routes.
SWDA colleagues did this on their own accord and this example highlights an important learning point, that we must consider the user experience of our services as a whole and not in parts. After all, users have no ability or interest in trying to distinguish between the parts owned by a digital product team, another department, or another organisation.
We have said for a long time that there is no wrong door. We must equally apply this principle of inclusive design to our digital services.
Addressing barriers therefore requires the full range of expertise, capabilities, and perspectives that all partners bring.
Our Smart Nation Policy Perception Survey this year noted that four in five Singaporeans found government and non-government websites and apps easy to use.
Encouragingly, more seniors found them easy to use compared to last year.
But there is still room to improve, across the public, private and people sectors.
All the apps we use are getting better and public service apps need to keep up. What felt like a good experience may no longer feel so in a matter of months, if not weeks.
To do better, we certainly need to work together, to pool our strengths and insights.
Persons with disabilities, seniors and caregivers bring their lived experiences. These are especially valuable in helping us understand their user journeys.
Industry partners such as Microsoft, Figma and Grab bring technology, tools and design expertise.
Students bring fresh perspectives as our next generation of designers and developers.
Together with industry, IHLs, the community and users, we can build a wider movement for inclusive design, making digital services across Singapore more accessible, and bringing us closer to our Smart Nation vision of “A Thriving Digital Future for All”.
Thank you all for being here.