Ethical and Equitable Digital Design Matrix — Co-Created Digital-Inclusion Guidelines for Indonesia

The Melbourne Social Equity Institute's ‘Ethical and Equitable Digital Design Matrix for Community-Engaged Research’ is a framework for involving marginalised communities in the design of digital tools. Researchers from the University of Melbourne, Universitas Hasanuddin and PerDIK (the Indonesian Disability Movement for Equality) adapted it for Indonesian organisations, publishing the ‘Ethical and Equitable Digital Design Matrix for Indonesian Organisations’ in December 2023 via the Australia-Indonesia Centre's PAIR programme.
The adaptation was grounded in a qualitative field study conducted between November 2020 and January 2021 with 86 people with disabilities and other stakeholders across three South Sulawesi settings — urban Makassar, peri-urban Gowa and rural Bulukumba — using a social-model, gender-aware framework. The research, supported by PerDIK's expertise in inclusive design and data collection, documented how disabled Indonesians improvised around inaccessible pandemic information: using text messaging, transcription apps and web captioners after mask mandates removed lip-reading as an option, while television broadcasts largely lacked sign-language interpretation or captions.
Universitas Hasanuddin's Language Centre translated the resulting matrix into Bahasa Indonesia, and the translation was reviewed and edited for readability with PerDIK before publication. The guidelines give organisations building digital services in Indonesia a practical, locally validated way to involve young people from the disability community from planning through to implementation, rather than treating accessibility as a late-stage audit.
The guidelines were published only in December 2023, and no public data on the number of organisations that have since adopted the matrix, or on any measured change in the accessibility of Indonesian digital services as a result, could be found; the evidence base to date is the original 86-person study and the co-creation process itself, not downstream uptake.

Read the full analysis: https://eng.unimelb.edu.au/ingenium/technology-and-society/guidelines-offer-path-for-digital-inclusion-for-indonesian-people-with-a-disability