Maxis' Deria Takbir app lets deaf users feel the Raya takbir — Gold Kancil 2019

For Hari Raya 2019, Malaysian telco Maxis launched Deria Takbir, a free iPhone app that makes the takbir — the chant that punctuates Eid prayers — tangible for deaf users. The app listens in real time and converts sound waves into cymatic visual patterns and haptic vibration, engaging the sight and touch that the Malaysian Federation of the Deaf (MFD) called the community's heightened senses. It was built with MFD input and vetted by Uztaz Mohammad Khairul Bin Mohd Lias, imam of Masjid Ara Damansara, so the religious content stayed correct.

The launch film, Deria Takbir Raya, follows Faiz, a deaf boy who for the first time feels present in the takbir when his father hands him the phone; it drew over 264,000 views within four days of upload, per Marketing-Interactive. Maxis brand and marketing head Tai Kam Leong framed the app as part of the company's promise to 'enable Malaysians and Malaysia'.

At the 2019 Kancil Awards the campaign took Gold for Best Use of Cultural Insights in Brand Experience & Activation, plus the Innovation Kancil and Culture Kancil special awards for Leo Burnett Kuala Lumpur and Maxis. The Star noted the app needs a quiet room to hear the chant cleanly, much like Shazam, and that it also works for the Takbir Haji at Hari Raya Aidil Adha and carries a list of prayers.

The phone already has haptics — let the takbir drive them

It ships: the app was downloadable on the App Store from launch, which separates it from accessibility campaigns that stop at the film.

Co-design with MFD and review by an imam made the experience authentic to both the deaf community and religious practice — the two audiences a wrong step would offend.

Zero new hardware: converting sound to haptics through the phone's existing engine kept cost near zero and distribution instant.

It solves the felt problem, not the visible one: MFD's own president described the takbir as something he found challenging to follow, and the app addresses exactly that moment.

The cheapest accessibility win reuses what users hold. Building on the iPhone's haptic engine kept cost near zero — but it only worked because the deaf federation co-designed it and an imam vetted it.

Deria Takbir stayed on the App Store (iPhone only, because it depends on the device's haptic engine), works for Aidil Adha prayers as well, and the campaign's three Kancil recognitions in 2019 — Gold, Innovation Kancil and Culture Kancil — made it one of that year's most decorated Malaysian campaigns.