Building Accessible Digital Futures: Disability, Transactions and Emerging Technologies across Asia

Grant Call: 2025 Social Science and Humanities Research Fellowship Call 

Project Status: Ongoing 

The project aims to understand emergent uses as well as possible barriers and implications regarding disability and digital mobile transactions across Southeast Asian contexts, to identify practical interventions and recommendations to make digital mobile transactions more inclusive, equitable, and empowering for disabled people across Asia and beyond. 

Asst Prof Zhuang hopes to achieve the following objectives through his project: 

• Establish the state of current approaches and current infrastructures of digital mobile transactions. 

• Understand how disabled people in Singapore and Southeast Asia transact digitally using mobiles. 

• Generate new insights for designing digital mobile transactions through creative co-design workshops. 

• Derive theoretical, design, and policy insights from disability to advance inclusive digital transaction futures in Singapore, Southeast Asia, and beyond. 

Findings from the project will offer a new approach to understanding disability globally by de-centring Western epistemologies that have hitherto been the dominant way of understanding digital inclusion and accessibility. This will significantly contribute to building a more digitally inclusive society and showcase internationally the best practices and ideas developed in Singapore.