Purchasing Power

Inspiration

After becoming involved in disability advocacy work and several web design projects, I began to realize how the internet is becoming less accessible for my blind friends as it became easier to build websites, especially in the context of e-commerce.

This was validated by research published by Nucleus Research in July of 2019 titled "The Internet is Unavailable". They found that 2/3 of online transactions of the blind were abandoned and that leaving this critical accessibility issue is costing online retailers $6.9 billions dollars each year in North America alone.

People with visual impairments generally use NVDA (an open source project), or can purchase JAWS software for roughly $1000 to access the internet. I spoke with a blind friend who let me know that he rarely knew the total of his transactions and often was putting his credit card information into a checkout, he needed to attempt his transaction multiple times and did not know how much he was spending or if his information was secure.

What it does

A chrome extension that auto-fills credit card information securely and delivers the total sum of a transaction in a text to speech format.

How I built it

Followed instructions on how to create a chrome extension and added 2 files to autofill a checkout form when the extension is clicked with the user's credit card information and provide the user a total of their purchase in a text to speech format.

Challenges I ran into

The extension isn't fully functional on chrome yet and the text to speech function needs to be built out.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Discovering an actionable way to improve the lives of the blind that would allow them to access a growing market.

What I learned

NVDA as well as other forms of accessible software in general create stopgaps because they are unable to anticipate how software development will change over time. HTML, javascript, CSS