App to help diners with visual impairment at hawker centres among ideas at inaugural challenge

SINGAPORE - Finding an empty table in a packed hawker centre is hard enough, let alone for persons with visual impairments.

An app that is being developed seeks to help them with this aspect of dining out through audio guidance over a paired Bluetooth earpiece or pair of smart glasses, though this is just one step of a complex journey for them.

Named LetsGo, the app prototype will tell the user “occupied table” or “empty table” when the user points their phone camera at their surroundings.

It is among several prototypes showcased on Oct 21 under the inaugural Inclusive Design Challenge (IDC) organised by GovTech Singapore in collaboration with Microsoft and software company Figma.

Held as part of GovTech Singapore’s annual Inclusive Design Week, the challenge aims to put users at the heart of the design process.

“For Singapore, our ambition for digital inclusion must reach higher,” said Minister for Digital Development and Information Josephine Teo in launching IDC on Oct 21.

“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.”

At the launch event held at Guoco Midtown Network Hub, Teo said that GovTech started piloting a programme known as Mystery Shopper to help it understand how people use its digital services.

GovTech said the pilot started in September 2026. By inviting users, including persons with disabilities and seniors, to use selected services as they would in everyday life, it can then uncover barriers that its accessibility checks may miss and help agencies improves their services.

LetsGo, for instance, addresses a key point in a complex multi-step journey to the hawker centre, based on feedback from eight visually-impaired interviewees that the app’s designers had garnered, said Genevieve Yip, a product designer from the Skills and Workforce Development Agency (SWDA), who’s part of the four-member team behind LetsGo.

“Ordering food... making payment. All these steps that we don’t even think about is a challenge for the visually-impaired, and that’s why a lot of them end up not going there on their own,” she said.

Other challenges include joining a queue, understanding the menu, carrying the food to the table, returning the tray and exiting the hawker centre, she said.

Another team member, product designer Tan Yu Qing, said one feedback that arose after testing the app with two visually-impaired persons, was to also incorporate the use of haptic phone vibrations because the loud ambient noise in hawker centres can drown out the audio guidance.

LetsGo is one of five concepts showcased at IDW.

Over two months from August 2026, a total of 17 teams comprising either public officers or tertiary students had worked alongside GovTech Singapore mentors, industry experts and users to research, design and test prototypes addressing everyday accessibility barriers.

A team of Temasek Polytechnic students, for instance, tackled the difficulties visually-impaired individuals face when making digital payments. They proposed consistent design principles across banking apps, such as reading important information first, announcing the status of a payment, and guiding users on what to do next.

Joy Ng, the head of the Chief Digital Experience Office at GovTech Singapore said the agency will continue to work with government agencies to further develop promising prototypes beyond the challenge.

Beyond inclusive solutions and making digital services “inclusive by design”, Singapore is also expanding AI-driven tools to tackle digital language barriers.

Teo said that GovTech and OGP (Open Government Products) 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 or Reaching Everyone for Active Citizenry @ Home, a government feedback and e-engagement unit and the Immigration & Checkpoints Authority, she said.