Access Shopper

Searching For a Solution That May Not Exist…

Overview

We were solving the problem of our community partner, Peri, who has a rare form of Muscular Dystrophy. She uses a wheelchair and has been on a ventilator since the age of two. She faces problems communicating with the customer services of shopping companies because the customer service executives do not understand her speech clearly when she calls them. I and a team conducted user research, usability testing, and legal research to come up with potential solutions for Peri's problem.

Timeline: 3 months

Techniques: UX Research, Usability testing, Legal Research

Team: Spandita Sarmah & Mingjing Jiang

Course: Developing Assistive Technologies

Here is a link to our project presentation:

Video to the final presentation of Access Shopper

Problem

Even though most of Peri's problems get resolved over the chat, there are some times when the issues do not get resolved just by this method. Thus, she's forced to go on a call with customer services. Also, there are some shopping companies that do not have the chat option. So in such cases, she, again, is pushed to go on a call with the customer service. That's where the problem begins.

After we identified Peri's problem, we began round two of our research which can be divided into three broad categories:

1. We called the customer surveys for six of Peri's, favorite online shopping companies asking about their accessibility options and policies.

2. We posted questions on Reddit and conducted short interviews on online forums for people with disabilities.

3. We also sent out surveys on Facebook groups to get more information about problems regarding customer service that people with disabilities experience.

Customer Services

When we contacted Amazon, the chat wasn’t useful so we had to call. We learned that they use Landline phones, and usually talk with the client’s speech assistant devices. They aren’t allowed to transfer clients from the chat to the call if the client states that they have a speech impairment.

Costco and Instacart couldn’t answer the questions over the chat but promised to send an email within 48 hours, but didn't.
American Eagle also wasn’t particularly helpful and replied in one line saying their "website is as accessible as it can be".
The CVS customer services said that people with speech impairment could only be helped when another person is by their side to assist them to make phone calls, which means the customer needs to have a “translator” to contact CVS.

Reddit, Facebook, Online Forums

The research using Facebook and forums on communication disorders wasn’t helpful, as people didn’t want to respond to the questions, and were frustrated that we posted them. But when posting questions on Reddit some people responded that gave an insight into why people are forced to call customer services instead of using the chat!

For instance, some of the users' replies included:

"Aria labels would be great. I use a screen-reader and if I’ve added an item to my cart, to hear that it’s been added using aria would be great!"

"Think you’re doing some UX research. I’m not disabled, but anything that is used with screen readers. Alt/title tags and tab functionality for menus and links."

Research Summary

Summing up what we found from our research is that people with difficulty talking or calling on the phone, are facing similar problems when contacting customer services. And there hasn't been a good solution for it yet, besides having someone by their side to call for them or googling everything by themselves. And what we see is a call for an independent solution.

Solutions & User Testing

We came down to exploring three final solutions: Text to speech technology, relay services, and advocacy to call for future improvements in the customer services training and guidelines.

Text-to-speech tech

Proloquo2Go

The first text-to-speech technology we found and tried It's an app that can be found on our iPhone or iPad or a MacBook Pro (Peri has all of them) called Proloquo2Go. Proloquo2go is an easy-to-use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) app for people who cannot speak or need help being understood based. A user can just touch a picture or type words, and the software will produce human-like speech.

However, Peri tried Proloquo2Go out and gave us the following feedback:

1) Customer service think the caller is not a real human customer.

2) It takes time to think and type the text to generate voice.

3) Customer service re-direct the caller to chatbox/email.

4) Difficult to adjust their speed of talking.

5) Not as useful as when actual human assists in making a phone call.

Spoken content & Loopback

Based on some of Peri's feedback on Proloquo2Go, we've found another text-to-speech technology that is a built-in feature Apple offers in their devices called Spoken Content. You can enable it in the system accessibility setting. And one problem is this function uses system internal sound, but when calling, we use a microphone. So we used the app called Loopback to change the source of the sound. So everything we need here and it is a no-cost solution.

The Apple's Spoken Content function allows for easier change in the speech speed rate than Proloquo2Go. Unfortunately, Peri couldn't test this solution due to her studies. but we tested this solution with CVS ourselves. The entire call with them took us 15 minutes and the customer service actually solved our issue successfully.

Relay services

We tried using the relay service and were successful in establishing end-to-end communication with the customer service of Amazon and Instacart. iPhones have an in-built RTT option that can be switched on to make direct RTT calls. But without even doing that and without even having an iPhone, we can make RTT calls just by calling 711. There are different types of relay calls like the text-to-speech relay is the one shown in the video. But there are other types of services too like speech to speech, video relay voice carryover, et cetera, which we will test in the future.

The video shows how one can make relay phone calls. We start by calling 711 and instantly an RTT icon will appear on the phone screen. A relay executive will receive the call and use RTT real-time text to ask us the phone number that we want to call. Then the relay executive will make the phone call for us and talk to whoever receives it, providing real-time subtitles of their conversation at the same time. In a way, a relay is mediating a conversation between us and the person on the other end.

Advocacy & ADA guidelines

Another direction that we took was contacting advocates on behalf of Peri. We sent six emails and received three replies.

The first one was from Jean Ryan, who was in the same frustrating situation with customer services recently when she was forced to call Amazon. She suggested the different solutions that we've tried already and provided her view that people don't want to have a translator with them. And it's really tough considering there might be a person with a hearing disability on another side of the line.

The second reply was from Walei Sabry, who supported our assumption that this might be a case of discrimination. And there should be specific policies accommodating people with speech disabilities.

The third reply was from Timothy Creagan who pointed out the Title II and Title III entities of ADA that obligate businesses, organizations, and governments to ensure that a person with a communication disability can receive information from them and convey information to them. They are also required to accept telephone calls placed through relay services.

Future Steps

Our next steps would be trying out the speech-to-speech relay service together with Peri to get her feedback on this solution.
As advocates suggested, we will encourage Peri to file a complaint with the Department of Justice and try out, loopback with Apple's Spoken Content feature.