While America's love affair with touch-screen payment devices
continues to leave the blind and visually impaired in the dark,
prospects for a hassle-free checkout in the near future are finally
looking up.
Four years ago, CreditCards.com explored the obstacles to the
blind posed by touch-screen devices. A sudden proliferation of the
devices at point-of-sale services didn't bode well for America's
3.3 million blind people.
Without an audio interface or tactile buttons, what seem like
technological advancements to the sighted leave the blind with no
secure way to enter their debit card PIN or verify the payment
total without help. Back then, their options were limited: Trust a
stranger to enter (and not abscond with) your PIN, pay by credit or
shell out cash and hope you paid the right amount and received the
correct change.
The good news: The same technological innovation that caused
this traffic backup in the first place has set about solving it,
with an unlikely leader at the forefront: Apple.
The technology brand famous for its proprietary philosophy was
the first to integrate accessibility into its entire product line,
including the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. It's still not a payment
solution, but it's a giant step toward one.
"Four years ago, most blind people would have said there was no
real way to make a touch-screen device accessible, and Apple
clearly did that," says Chris Danielsen, the spokesman for the
National Federation of the Blind. "As a result, the iPhone,
contrary to everyone's expectations, has become extremely popular
among blind people."
By making the touch screen accessible via screen-access
voice-over and magnification, Apple enabled the blind and visually
impaired to surf the Web in ways they'd never imagined. As a
result, the thousands of app developers looking to tap into Apple
land tend to make their electronic tools accessible as well.
Oh, the places the blind can now go, thanks to iPhone apps!
Here's a sampling:
-
LookTel Money Reader
instantly verbalizes each denomination of U.S. currency placed in
front of the iPhone camera, no picture-taking required. (Did we
mention that the United States stands alone among 180
currency-issuing jurisdictions as the only country that prints
all denominations of all its bills the same size and color?)
-
SayText
scans and reads any text put before the iPhone camera, a godsend
for things such as medical forms, restaurant menus and, in a
pinch, a touch-screen display.
-
Digit-Eyes
not only audibly reads the product information (name,
ingredients, even recipes) on 27 million grocery store items by
scanning their bar codes, it also enables the blind to print
their own QR labels at home so they can identify items in their
pantry with their iPhone.
-
LookTel Breadcrumbs GPS
enables the blind to navigate via iPhone by dropping digital
orientation tags, or "breadcrumbs," along their routes.
"It's been revolutionary," says Jonathan Simeone, a blind Oregon
disabilities lawyer whose work with the advocacy group It's Our
Money, Too helped the American Council for the Blind win a currency
accessibility showdown with the U.S. Treasury. "I think Apple has
actually done more for blind people than the blindness advocacy
organizations."
Unfortunately, Apple remains one of the few beacons in a
unenlightened manufacturing landscape that still leaves blind
people lost in the supermarket. Unless a touch-screen ATM or POS
talks or has tactile buttons, the blind are going to need help.
Near-field communications, or NFC, "contactless" payment
terminals might be an option, but there are scant few of those
around. Banks and merchants seem equally nonplussed by non-numeric
identifiers such as fingerprint scans.
Tactile options
"What would be great would the equivalent of what we do now
visually on touch screens in a more tactile way, for instance, by
having the 'pay now' button pop up out of the screen," says Alison
Roberts, a blind Boston member of It's Our Money, Too. "Machines
that have buttons aren't millions of dollars more expensive."
A handful of recent designs attempt to bridge the vision gap
from the other end by integrating pop-up Braille displays into a
credit card and even a cellphone. While our panel of advocates
appreciates the gesture and values Braille as the only real tool
for blind literacy, they've grown weary of such workarounds when
the technology now exists to make universal design a reality.
"If an app developer can sell you an app for less than $20 that
will tell you the price, description, ingredients and cooking
instructions of any item in your supermarket, how can that same
supermarket tell you they can't come up with something that would
tell you how much you're being charged for it at checkout?" asks
Simeone. "The ATM in your store talks; why can't your point-of
sale-device talk? If sighted people had no idea what they were
being charged when they checked out, there would be outrage."
Still, Chris Danielsen says things are looking up. Taxicabs in
Boston and New York City now boast fully accessible touch-screen
payment devices. Some airlines will now scan a bar code on your
smartphone to generate your boarding pass, allowing the blind to
bypass the awkwardness of touch-screen kiosks. And a few brave
merchants now offer an app that generates a one-time QR code on the
iPhone to enable secure card payment without a separate PIN,
although ironically it is not yet accessible to the blind.
"The trend is always toward more access," Danielsen says. "We're
at this curious inflection point where the technology is definitely
there, and if we could ever reach a tipping point where it is
universally implemented, there wouldn't be any more problems. But
we haven't reached that tipping point yet, and it's very hard to do
in the current climate."