Emma Nicoson, a Google scholar, who is a graduate instructor and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Missouri, is striving to make apparel e-commerce sites more accessible to people with low vision and blindness.
Having cast a wide net to try to improve online shortcomings, one priority for her is to ensure that retailers use precise language on their sites. Names of colors, like “carbon ash” for example, are ambiguous and make no sense for consumers, who are blind or of low vision, she said.
“As professionals in this field, we recognize that we are part of the process in disabling these individuals. We’re really focused on thinking about how we name things and describe products, because we are doing it in a sight-dependent environment and there is bias. Instead we should be thinking about online shopping from the perspective of someone who was blind from birth, and whose family members told them what red looks like, or from the perspective of someone who lost their vision later in life,” she said.
Finding a way to hold apparel manufacturers accountable for web accessibility in accordance with the American Disabilities Act is one of her objectives. Norway is the leading country for digital accessibility standards that are enforced through a government agency that shuts down noncompliant sites and later helps companies build them back up, Nicoson said.
In 2021, the United Nations declared that access to published digital content is a basic human right.
Last year Nicoson and Jung Ha-Brookshire, a fellow Ph.D. student at the University of Missouri, examined apparel websites’ compliance to digital accessibility laws and how people with visual impairments navigate content and products online. People with visual impairments, or PVI, are those with low vision or blindness categorized by the level of visual acuity and visual field.
As a recipient of an independent research grant from the American-Scandinavian Foundation, she will be off to Oslo for 10 months to further explore the sector. In Norway, she will work with the University of Oslo’s department of informatics’ Tone Bratteteig and her team of 10 blind computer scientists. Nicoson will also be working with the secretary general of the Norwegian Digitalization Agency, which works to keep all sites compliant with all digital accessibility laws.
“As a sighted person and working in this sight-dependent industry, I think a lot of people don’t understand what blindness is. It’s a spectrum and not one vision loss looks the same. Not all people, who are blind, see all black. They may see some light perception. They may see colors, shades and outlines of objects,” Nicoson said. “Also, you can enter this community of people at any time in your life either temporarily or permanently. No one can imagine what taking away your sight can look like.”
Online PVI require assistive technology that provides human interface to the website’s alternative text in various modalities such as screen readers and linear navigation. Title III of the American Disabilities Act (1990) requires businesses open to the public to provide effective and nondiscriminatory communication through digital accessibility, which centers on access to products, resources and services across hardware and software in the digital spaces of apparel retailing. Many apparel sites are not compliant to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and limit PVI’s ability to access apparel.
Shopping with a friend, who was losing his vision due to retinitis pigmentosia, made her realize how describing clothing to him was “super challenging.” That led to her pursuing the underserved area of digital accessibility. Acknowledging how everyone wants to choose their own clothing and feel seen by relaying their identity to the world, Nicoson said that improving landing pages is necessary.
PVI use screen readers including ones like JAWS that is available for purchase and reads aloud page content and semantic information like lists, headings and links. While sighted people can use a computer mouse to move around a site and tap on individual tabs that may not be symmetrically aligned for additional information, PVI prefer linear navigation.
Noting how post-pandemic, online shopping is still the preferred means for many, Nicoson aims to partner with one or two retailers that will declare digital accessibility as part of their mission statement and create those changes on product landing pages. An initial study of Target’s site indicates that it is pretty accessible for PVI, whereas that was not the case with a previous study of Amazon’s site, said Nicoson. “Most people with visual impairment have trouble getting something into their shopping cart,” she said.
Target uses basic color naming with choices like gray, black, blue and navy blue, and their images have coding that allows PVI users to hear “a decent description” of the apparel product, Nicoson said. “Whereas with Amazon, sometimes they have it, and sometimes it will just say, ‘a human leg’ instead of telling you what the apparel product is.”
