The Barriers to Online Clothing Websites for Visually Impaired People: An Interview and Observation Approach to Understanding Needs

TL;DR

This study investigates the challenges visually impaired individuals face when shopping for clothes online, highlighting issues with website descriptions, reliance on reviews, and trust in automated assistance, through observational and interview methods.

Contribution

It introduces a dual-method approach combining observation and interviews to better understand VI users' online clothing shopping behaviors and needs.

Findings

Clothing descriptions are often inaccurate or misleading.

VI users rely on customer comments due to unreliable search tools.

Trust in automated assistance systems is generally low but could be improved.

Abstract

Visually impaired (VI) people often face challenges when performing everyday tasks and identify shopping for clothes as one of the most challenging. Many engage in online shopping, which eliminates some challenges of physical shopping. However, clothes shopping online suffers from many other limitations and barriers. More research is needed to address these challenges, and extant works often base their findings on interviews alone, providing only subjective, recall-biased information. We conducted two complementary studies using both observational and interview approaches to fill a gap in understanding about VI people's behaviour when selecting and purchasing clothes online. Our findings show that shopping websites suffer from inaccurate, misleading, and contradictory clothing descriptions; that VI people mainly rely on (unreliable) search tools and check product descriptions by reviewing customer comments. Our findings also indicate that VI people are hesitant to accept assistance from automated, but that trust in such systems could be improved if researchers can develop systems that better accommodate users' needs and preferences.