Indonesian live captions and productivity tool for lectures

Indonesia's Central Statistics Agency found in 2015 that almost nine million Indonesians over the age of 10 had difficulty hearing. By 2020, the same agency estimated more than 22 million Indonesians with any disability — approximately 5% of the total population — with hearing-related disability representing a significant portion. The WHO places the Southeast Asia region as having the second-highest global burden of hearing loss, with approximately 109.5 million people affected (PMC7960691). For a country of 280 million, the number of people navigating daily life — and university education — without functional hearing is substantial.

A study by the Jakarta-based SMERU Research Institute found that Indonesians with disabilities experience significant discrimination, tending to have lower education levels, more limited employment opportunities, and less access to public facilities than non-disabled peers. For deaf and hard of hearing students at Indonesian universities, the lecture hall presents the same structural absence as in many countries: no real-time captioning, no standardised sign language interpreter provision, and an expectation of hearing that the infrastructure does not challenge. Indonesian Sign Language (BISINDO) has no official national recognition, and interpreter training at the university level remains nascent.

A platform specifically designed to provide accessible information for deaf and hard of hearing audiences in Indonesia was documented by the International Journalists' Network (IJNET, 2023) as filling a gap that no public institution addresses: the systematic absence of accessible Indonesian-language content for deaf and hard of hearing people. In a university context, this absence is most acute in the lecture hall — where a deaf student sits through the same sessions as hearing peers but without the same access to the content being delivered.