Dristikohon: reimagining platform for visually impaired individuals inclusion to digital financial services in Bangladesh

Abstract

Accelerated digitization has thoroughly reshaped the ways individuals communicate, access information, manage daily activities and conduct financial transactions - especially for people with disabilities. While existing research has extensively examined challenges and adoption strategies in the context of Global North, a significant gap remains in understanding user engagement in the Global South, given the infrastructural asymmetry and socio-economic distinction. Our study aims to bridge the gap by exploring how visually impaired individuals navigate the world of technology, focusing on the influence of socio-economic factors in shaping these engagement, access and navigate financial services - particularly digital financial services (DFS), and the strategies they employ to overcome structural and contextual barriers. Guided by these research questions we conducted focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews with 18 visually impaired individuals in urban settings to get a glimpse of their lived experiences with technology and digital financial services. The findings highlights the negative effect of societal perception in shaping technology use and hindering daily activities, challenges faced in financial transactions, local mobile financial services incompatibility with screen readers. It also reveals design features to enhance security in systems that often create vulnerability, reduce accessibility, and exclude the marginalized ones from such platforms. We align these findings to various sociological, post-colonial theories to assess the impact and draw similarities with previous work to emphasize the need for design and build with intended users and bring visibility through prototyping “Dristikohon”. Dristikohon is a platform prototype focused on incorporating the noticeable design limitations that Visually Impaired People face while using existing mobile financial systems. Our work brings the fundamental concepts of Human Computer Interaction into use to empower a marginalized community from alienation, exclusion with smart and participatory design.