E51: Pioneering Digital Accessibility in Indonesia: Rahma Utami’s Mission

Rahma Utami shares her journey in establishing Indonesia's first digital accessibility consultancy and creating innovative programs like the Empathy Lab to foster meaningful connections between technology creators and disabled users. Her work highlights the power of accessibility advocacy through community building, direct engagement with disabled individuals, and developing local expertise in regions where accessibility awareness is still emerging.

Transcript

 Speaker 00:02

Welcome to the IAAP United in Accessibility podcast, where we showcase the impactful journeys of leaders advancing accessibility and inclusion. We are privileged to feature Rahma Utami, a distinguished digital accessibility expert and advocate from Indonesia. As the Founder and Knowledge & Accessibility director of Suarise Rahma has dedicated the past seven years to disability inclusion in the digital sector. With over 15 years of experience in the digital business, she specializes in digital marketing, UX research and accessibility consultancy. Rahma has delivered training to more than 1000 individuals and collaborated with over 35 prominent brands to improve digital accessibility. Her leadership has earned Suarise the 2022 Zero Project Award for civic engagement, and her contributions to accessibility were further recognized with the 2024 IAAP Impact Award. In this episode, we explore Rahma professional evolution, her role in shaping Indonesia's national digital accessibility standards and her perspectives on fostering inclusive digital environments.

 Rachel Paul 01:21

Welcome to our IAAP United in Accessibility podcast. I'm Rachel Paul with IAAP, and today I am excited to be chatting with Rahma Utami. Rahma is a 2024 IAAP Impact Award winner, and I can't wait to dive in and let her share with you her accessibility journey and her achievement which had led her to be selected as a winner. So welcome, Rahma. Please introduce yourself and tell us where you are joining us from today and a little bit about your background in accessibility.

 Rahma Utami  01:54

Okay, Hi, Rachel. Hi everyone. My name is Rahma, and I'm come from Indonesia. I mean, if you don't know, go where is Indonesia, it's the country that providing Bali. I'm currently building a social enterprise called Suarise. We're focusing on disability inclusion in the digital sectors, and we have been in Indonesia since 2017, but also before Suarise, there was no consultancy or any accessibility services in Indonesia yet. So, there are only organizations with persons with disability, but not really in terms of digital accessibility. Before that, I was experienced as a digital strategist in the digital advertising industry for almost 10 years, and my exposure with accessibility actually pretty early. It was on 2007 I discover about screen readers for my college thesis, I created a campaign for the blind to work in formal sector for my bachelor’s degree. After that, I definitely not into the topic. Again, I returned to the topic in 2016 initially to explore about the opportunity of teaching digital content writing to the blind community as SEO content writers and I decided to build a social enterprise instead in 2017 which is Suarise. But during our first program, we also discovered accessibility issues. So, we don't know, back then, it's a WCAG. We don't we know WCAG, I think, in late 2018, and apparently, the way we discover it, we realized that this topic is not really well known in Indonesia. And back then, I can say the awareness is almost zero. So yeah, that's what makes Suarise is becoming the pioneering in a voice in digital accessibility in Indonesia. 

Rachel Paul 04:04

Well, you certainly have accomplished a lot in a very short period of time, and that's why I would love to personally congratulate you for being an Impact Award winner. And so, for our audience who may not be familiar with the award, this impact award is given to only a select few nominees that have made outstanding organizational, strategic and impactful contributions to the accessibility inclusion. And awardees are employees that have gone above and beyond in their role and have made an impact on accessibility within their organization. Can you share with us what this recognition has meant to you and what impact it will have on your work going forward?

 Rahma Utami 04:46

Okay, in terms of the impact, I think it's about personal validations. I mean, if we talk about the impact in Indonesia with the landscape of the country that need a lot of awareness. They don't even know what IAAP is right now. I mean, we are the ones that introduced all of the WCAG all over the place, so they don't even know about the association and everything. But for me, it's benefiting me in terms of getting partners or getting some potential collaborator outside Indonesia, because we want to bring many people to Indonesia in terms of for the events, for the resource or knowledge sharing, and it's easier to tell them that, Hi, I'm Rahman, previously recognized as this and that, so they have more context for what I did so far. But to be honest, if I want to choose, I'd love it if the word given to the organization rather than my name, because what we work right now, it's not solemnly, my only work, it's a team work with me and Suarise, but also the commitment from the team, from the volunteer. So definitely, it's not a personal achievement, but a teamwork.

 Rachel Paul 06:19

That's great. It's great to hear that you have a team that's working with you and supporting the work that you do. So, I know you shared with us about Suarise and how you started it. How has your vision evolved for the organization since it was established?

 Rahma Utami 06:38

Well, the visions on what I have from Suarise are actually expanding, because it's also depended on and shaped by a discovery that we had a longer time. So, for example, in 2017 we thought we will focus on empowering the disability community, mainly people with vision impairments for skillset in digital world, and apparently those skills will not matter if the platform is accessible. And then we discovered about website and app accessibility, and then we realized that accessibility is fundamental for almost everything in life, from employment, knowledge, economy, basically all participation in society. So okay, if we're not addressing this, we will face the same challenge, the same barrier from society. Although we have very talentful people, they will face hindrance and all the obstacles, and people don't really know why, because, well, definitely it's about the platform, and they don't know that the problem is on the platform, not the people. And actually, we were thinking just as advocate, because my background is advertising, so I thought, okay, let's focus and advocate accessibility and then developing digital talents. But when we do the cabinet for advocating, we also share survey, and we realize that people don't even know what is WCAG and they need a knowledge, and they need framework. They need a library; they need resources. They need the how those and as for myself, I'm from design background. I also never been teaching about WCAG or how to design with color blind, for example. So, it's also hard for me from when opening the WCAGs. It's too difficult, but I got lucky, because when I was in the UK and finishing my master degree, I work in AbilityNet as accessibility consultant and that also give a huge discovery about how accessibility landscape, in terms of the event, activities, what we can do and from that moment, when I returned to Indonesia in 2020 I'm finishing my master's degree, and I'm finishing my work in AbilityNet we add accessibility services and such. So now our vision is enabling disability inclusion in Indonesia through digital accessibility, basically.

 Rachel Paul 09:18

Oh, that's great, I didn't realize that you had experience already had some work under AbilityNet, they've been a long-time member and a big supporter, and do a lot of great things with accessibility. You mentioned about how it’s all about the people, the people that you're advocating for, and these so it seems like you really have a user centric design so how do you ensure that users with disabilities remain at the core of your product development process? 

 Rahma Utami 09:46

So, I realized that encountering directly with the person with disability is actually the deal breaker for almost everything. So, what we're trying to do here is to make people meet them directly, face to face. Even in our campaign, in our program, we provide a space where they can meet, talk, discuss, and even do some challenge with the people with disability themselves, in terms of the technology, because in Indonesia, if you have been interact with persons with disability, especially a blind person, it's usually for the social context, like charity, or even worse, it's like in Indonesia, they are well known as the straight position, so there is no technology context here they even the society, a majority thought that the blind people cannot access the technology. They need to be helped by the caregiver. So, the way they know how a person with a disability accesses a website or accesses an app is to meet them directly and see with their own eyes. So that is the moment for everyone, like everyone. So even though we give some stories, some demonstrations, everything, it never replaces encounter with the community themselves. And the good thing, because we started as a program for the blind community, we have more than 150 database and access to the person. So when we have clients or programs, we always invite them to be part of it, not only to share their voice, but also to do some demonstrations, and even in some of our program, like the A11yID, we always make sure there is at least one representative of person with disability in all the interactive activities that we provide, so that people who encounter and meet the person directly remember and once they take off from our event, from our room, from our project. It's basically a point of no return in having the understanding about how technology enabling the people more and more.

 Rachel Paul 12:14

And we can underestimate how important it is to include people with disabilities that like to get that face-to-face interaction. Hear what they have to say. What are their needs? You know, taking that into consideration for anything that we're doing, I'd like to talk more about your Empathy Lab. I'd love to hear more about that. And can you share some key learning experiences and how has that shaped Suarise direction.

 Rahma Utami 12:43

I'm experiencing Empathy Lab up in the HSBC Academy wharf. So, it was a internal event. So, I learned about the framework, about the activity that we do in Empathy Lab in Indonesia. Because I come from the advertising background, I craft fully a bit about the Empathy Lab becoming a challenge. So, everyone that comes to space will need to do some challenge related to accessibility. So instead of just telling them to do or telling them about accessibility, we ask them about their background and then we ask them to find accessibility features and referrals and pick some challenge for them to do. So, the challenge is vary from like typing without seeing the keyboard just to listen to the audio, or reading without seeing the screen, also playing games without seeing the TVs. The way we do initially we create an event. We have like 20 guests of scenario of people and approximately 20 volunteers to deliver all the interactive activities. But we realized with the lack of awareness of Accessibility Indonesia, we need to do crowd pulling for the event. So, for the later event, we decide to pop ups on event that has no correlation with disability at all. So we make a small version of the accessibility pop up, and then we deliver five to ten scenarios with some of the display information and definitely in this space, we have the person with disability and also some volunteers, and so far, we have helped that for ten times, with two, even a big one, with in collaboration with some university in Indonesia, with a total more than, I guess, 1000 people involved within the space of them particular.

 Speaker 14:59

The IAAP Accessible Document Specialist ADS credential is intended for accessibility professionals who create and remediate accessible electronic documents and their related policies. The ADS credential represents an ability to express an intermediate level of experience, designing, evaluating and remediating accessible documents. The ADS credential is beneficial for people in or aspiring to be a User Experience Designer or Tester, Web Content Manager and Administrators, Project, Program and ICT Managers and more. Check out the IAAP ADS certification web page to learn more.

 Rachel Paul 15:49

That sounds really impactful and also interesting to have people engaged in those, those different scenarios. So, it sounds like you really have attacked accessibility, and this is one of the reasons why you received an award is because you have attacked it from both sides. You're working within the disability community, trying to make the world more accessible, but you're also going outward by training people about accessibility and to actually do the work. So, I know one of the things you were recognized for was hosting the first digital accessibility boot camp in Indonesia, and I heard they had over 100 participants and it has been like a springboard or launching pad for those looking to have a career in accessibility. Can you share a little bit more about that and how that worked. Are you planning future boot camps? What might that look like? 

 Rahma Utami 16:46

Definitely. So, when we advocate about accessibility, the question either where we start, or where should I go, or who can build this so it's since the talent and the expertise is lacking. I mean, I can say, if we talk about, is there an accessibility professionals in Indonesia, I can say, I'm the first, because I come without anyone know what accessibility specialist is. And so, it's becoming like a necessity to build the community of expertise, because otherwise, every time we do advocates, there's no one who can do it. At least, we also want to expand the expertise and the evangelist of the topics in Indonesia. So instead of focusing on, let's say developer designers only, I realized that accessibility is teamwork. Because in my previous professional experience in advertising agency, I also design websites or apps, and I work side by side with developers. And when I am digging down all the accessibility criteria, at least there are some fundamental roles in making the product accessible. Back then in the UK, I didn't know if there is any activity related activity like this, what I know is, the course is pretty general, and it's never intended to be for, let's say, designers or developers on everything. So, with my early knowledge, I always said I'm not the smartest hit, but I simply the one who start earlier than everyone, and with the network I know, I concept the A11y Boot Camp and participant need to be come from four backgrounds. The first one is the web developers, the second one is the product designers. The third one is the UX writer, and the last one is the UX researcher. So, we combine it in an activity and in the three-month boot camp, there were two stations per week and with three offline stations, and we held the event in three cities at once. So, it's in Jakarta and Yogyakarta and in Malang. In Malang, we collaborated with Brawijaya University. I think any person of them is professional, early professional, and 20% of them are students, university students. I train the people myself, but also, I got some help from my network, such as Arifat, who is a designer who also cared about accessibility. And surprisingly, I discover some Indonesian diaspora, who work in accessibility field in their company. Although they are not accessibility specialist, but their web accessibility or their software engineer, and they also do accessibility as part of their day to day job, and one of them is accessibility champion as well in eBay, they helped me to cover some topics, especially in terms of the developer side, and as for the sessions, we have 20 sessions, and we divide the participant into 40 people and 10 collaborators of person with disability. So, each group will pair with a person with a disability to build their study case. Each of the groups will have a sector to focus on the greater study case and now you can check the result of the study case in our YouTube as well. So, in Suraise ID YouTube, you can find a playlist called A11y Boot Camp study case, so we have a variety of accessibility revamp audits and also reviews from the graduates.

 Rachel Paul 21:12

Well, I am just so impressed, and I definitely want to check out that case study on YouTube. But as a team of one, what you've been able to accomplish again in this short time and really make a difference there. It's just, it's so wonderful to hear all the changes that you're making and the influence that you're having. So hopefully we're building up a team, and you continue these events, and you'll have a whole support team in the future. I'm just going to switch gears for a little bit, and AI comes up a lot. It's a hot topic, and it's been playing an increasing role in assistive technology. So how do you guide your developers to use AI responsibly and ethically and while making sure it remains accessible to all?

 Rahma Utami 21:57

Well, this is a pretty funny for me, because last year I also shared the same thoughts about AI and accessibility in Google Developer Group events in Bandung. And what I said back then is, if you think AI already resolves every accessibility challenge, you get it wrong. So, in fact, you can make your project accessible 100% even without AI. So, I give some prepositions about how to utilize AI in terms of accessibility, whether it is on the process of creating the product or as a digital feature in any products, but just to address or rely on AI or accessibility means that the people or the product team may have like a fundamental aspect what accessibility is. So, for me, it's like AI is expanding and making the work easier and also opening new opportunities in terms of assistive technology, or even as tools to make an accessible product, but it never replaces our basic understanding in how to make the product accessible by doing all the checklist on WCAGs.

 Rachel Paul 23:22

Well, I think that's worth repeating, that AI cannot fix all your accessibility issues, and it is not a one fix all, and there's nothing does replace that, that human touch and that additional, you know, just something that a person, person can do. So that was good to hear you say that. So, every organization will experience some growing pains over the years. So what challenges do you anticipate as Suarise continues to expand? 

 Rahma Utami 23:54

Definitely, I mean, I could love loudly about the challenge, because in terms of advocating people just take it as wow, this is the cool stuff. So, we have to argue that it's not only about the cool stuff. It's fundamental. We need to do that. And the way you appreciate us is at least to add Alt text to your image. For example, you're praising about, oh, this is cool, or this, this is something meaningful. It's actually nothing if you do nothing as well. So we, we have to emphasize that, because otherwise it is just a formality of praising for what we've done so far. And another challenge is about collecting resources and capital, because right now, Suarise is running as a social enterprise, and we have been running since 2017 without investors. So, it is all bootstrapped, although we follow some, let's say incubator, or business speech, or something like that. They always argue about the demon, because right now we are nurturing and fostering the demon Indonesia. So, we haven’t answered demon yet. It's like more than like, like traditional rather than a business for the challenge to fund our activity, although we have the services, but it's not like 100% covering all the costs that we had in Suarise. So, we are also running for CSR, local CSR, but also trying to reach out some grants, for example, the A11y Boot Camp and also the Empathy Lab Up are 100% supported by the APNIC Foundation through the ISA Asia program. So, without that trust in believing in us and funding our program, actually, we cannot go that far.

Rachel Paul 26:00

Well, I have no doubt that you're going to be up to meet those challenges. So just as we're closing the interview today in this discussion, I have two final questions. So, it's been so interesting to hear about your work, and so I just give you an opportunity. If you have any key takeaways that you would like to share with our audience today?

Rahma Utami 26:23

So, in Indonesia, we have 22 Ish million person with disabilities. So, if you can imagine, it's almost like the whole Australia becoming disabled from the airport to the beach. So, it's a huge community, and also a huge opportunity. And what I believe is, if we can involve the community directly in the heart of accessibility, not only in Indonesia but globally, I think we can develop and accelerate the collaboration and meaningful participation for the community, and for that reason as well, because we have been voicing accessibility challenge from Indonesian disability community by our video and the accessibility task, or accessibility challenge. Right now, we are developing a platform to aggregate all the voice, all the report, and show it as a live dashboard, if the community have a challenge and report, so the rest of the people Indonesia can directly know about not only about the accessibility issue, but also it show and it surface the feasibility of the community as a part of Indonesian society and greater disability community.

Rachel Paul 27:50

That definitely sounds like there's still quite a bit of work to do and Indonesia, but you've been such a big factor in the movement and accessibility that's happening here. So, my last question for you, I just want to know, like, what is next? What is next for you, what assigning projects or initiatives are in the pipeline at Suarise?

Rahma Utami 28:13

The good thing is, I think for the last three years, there are many initiatives regarding accessibility, especially from the disability community and the SAM tech community, and we also have been engaged with them, and we hope that we can help our first accessibility conference this year and showing off all the showcase, all the product, all the company or all the organization that contribute to accessibility, so that the society and even the organization, even the government, know that some solutions already exist locally, and also to make the topic widely known, especially in the landscape of Indonesian technology industry, and also to the platform that I mentioned to you before. We are still struggling in developing it, because for many people, building a website 100% accessible from scratch is kind of challenging, so it's like a marathon. We have been delayed in terms of the delivery. So, I hope those two, the conference and the platform, become the focus for Suarise this year.

Rachel Paul 29:35

I wish you the best of luck with both the conference and those other initiatives that that you have planned, it's been a pleasure of spending this time and again congratulations on being an Impact Award winner is definitely well deserving, and I look forward to watching your journey and what's next. Thank you for your time today. 

Rahma Utami 29:56

Thank you. You’re welcome, Rachel.

Speaker 30:00

The International Association of Accessibility Professionals offers a variety of membership options for individuals and organizations. Whether you are an expert in accessibility or just starting your journey, join the only global accessibility professional association promoting and improving digital accessibility and physical environments. IAAP advocates for the inclusive design and creation of accessible products, content, services and spaces to ensure no one is left behind due to physical, sensory, cognitive health or psychological related impairment. United in Accessibility, join IAAP and become a part of the global accessibility movement.