"I Bought This for Me to Look More Ordinary": A Study of Blind People Doing Online Shopping

Online shopping, by reducing the needs for traveling, has become an essential part of lives for people with visual impairments. However, in HCI, research on online shopping for them has only been limited to the analysis of accessibility and usability issues. To develop a broader and better understanding of how visually impaired people shop online and design accordingly, we conducted a qualitative study with twenty blind people. Our study highlighted that blind people's desire of being treated as ordinary had significantly shaped their online shopping practices: very attentive to the visual appearance of the goods even they themselves could not see and taking great pain to find and learn what commodities are visually appropriate for them. This paper reports how their trying to appear ordinary is manifested in online shopping and suggests design implications to support these practices.