Accessibility: New Card Designed for Partially Sighted Customers
- The Korean designer Young-Suk Kim from Yanko Design firm launches a new concept of bank card specially crafted to respond to partially sighted customers’ needs.
- Its dimensions are the same as a traditional payment card and it embeds a technology enabling Braille text display so that the customer can verify and validate his payment transactions in convenience stores for instance. It also integrates a voice application as well as small speakers. Considering these features, it could replace paper receipts as the transactions’ history is also stored on the card.
- This designer is interested in developing new technological solutions to improve the bank card of the future. A few months ago, he presented a multi-application card prototype, OneCard, enabling storage of all payment and customer loyalty cards on a single medium.
- Also, this kind of innovation must today be part of the banking sector’s strategy. The 2005 French law on equality of rights and chances as well as handicapped citizens’ participation, required all players to grant full access to their premises and services. There are now about two million partially sighted individuals in France and these potential customers’ expectations are not yet all addressed. In addition to traditional services, generally proposed by the banks upon request (banking statements in Braille, card readers, adapted online services, etc.), the banking sectors now works on means to provide more autonomy and security to this public.
- In Belgium, in October 2010, BNP Paribas Fortis announced they would install voice ATMs (about ten automatons mid-December and 600 more in 2011); In Rome, Diebold partnered with the Italian association for the blind (Unione Italiana Ciechi) and added the Agilis audio guide on 625 automatons out of the 2,000 Banca Nazionale del Lavoro ATMs in November 2010 (also, subsidiary of BNP Paribas).