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Spill

The Blind and Commerce

Here’s a question to you. Do you think that 508 Compliance provides the best experience for people with disabilities? We did some tests with blind respondents back in January of this year for a large online/brick-and-mortar retailer and I’m here to tell you it is not.

Most everyone has heard about Target’s lawsuit for not providing access for disabled individuals. Having seen their site translated by JAWS I can attest to the fact that the experience merited a lawsuit. But we also tested many other eCommerce sites and found that even the best still took 5 minutes to traverse one page. Section 508 Compliance, and for the most part the W3C Accessibility Standards, only mandates proper display of information so that it can be accessed by assisting devices. What is missing is an understanding that maybe the content presented to individuals with disabilities should be streamlined to be more appropriate to the medium they use to access it.

We did some research and found that in the United States today there are 10 million blind and visually disabled individuals. We’re still gathering numbers on what percentage of that group is purchasing products on the internet but it’s interesting to note that the number is expected to triple in the next 10 years as baby boomers age. This seems to me to be a significant enough number to incite retailers to start thinking about the problem now.

We’ve gone down the path a little bit by creating an applet that can detect JAWS (remember it’s not a browser, it reads the content in a browser) and swaps out the presentation style sheet accordingly. We’re also starting to understand what the blind consumer really shops for. We believe there is an opportunity for some thinking with regard to product descriptions. Blind people cannot use color and other visual descriptions to purchase products.

I think the most telling tale is that of Peapod. Peapod provides to-the-door delivery of grocery items in Chicagoland and other markets like New York, Washington, DC, and Boston. They offer a service that is not only desired, but required for those with visual impairments. Unfortunately, their site is not accessible. There are even classes that teach the blind how to navigate the Peapod site.

So what do we do? Well, this post is the beginning of a discussion. We will continue to explore and hopefully you will join us. We have already begun working with the wonderful folks at the Chicago Lighthouse to gain insight. Hopefully we can make the world just a little bit better for everyone.

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Posted by Joseph Juhnke on July 18, 2007

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