A person uses voiceover on their phone One study participant needed to book a flight but encountered barriers on the airline’s website, reporting that the fields for choosing cities and departure dates could not be accessed on either her computer or her smartphone. After trying on both devices, she called the airline, waited on hold for two hours, and then spent an additional hour with an airline representative booking the flight and securing special assistance related to flying with her service animal. “The whole ordeal was extremely time consuming and frustrating, and if I hadn’t been off from work today, there was no way I could have booked the flight,” she wrote.

This participant was not alone in her experience of time lost to digital access barriers. On average, study participants reported that digital barriers cause tasks to take about twice as long as they would without barriers. Specifically, participants spent 55% of total task time dealing with digital barriers, and only 45% of that time on the task itself. That means that a task with a digital barrier that takes a sighted person 45 minutes to complete would take 100 minutes, on average, for a blind or low vision person.

This extra time often arose from participants working to resolve digital barriers independently, which was the most common strategy used. Participants reported resolving or working around digital barriers by themselves 47% of the time. Although they often succeeded in circumventing the digital barriers, this extra work had substantial negative impacts on the participants. Nearly half (N=105) of the barrier descriptions included comprehensive accounts highlighting the additional labor — extra cognitive load, extra effort, and extra steps — that participants had to navigate while conducting everyday online activities like buying jeans or accessing a child’s grades. Within this context of extra labor and extra wasted time, 66 participants specifically reported feelings of frustration and anger, as well as anxiety about potentially missing opportunities if a solution could not be found. One participant, after spending three hours struggling with an inaccessible PDF for an affordable housing application, wrote that “this process is so completely anxiety ridden.”

One participant, after spending three hours struggling with an inaccessible PDF for an affordable housing application, wrote that “this process is so completely anxiety-ridden.”

— Study Participant

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