From the Community

Security and Account Access

  • Sam received a phone call from his bank that his account is frozen. He discovered that someone has his PIN and has been using it to make online purchases. He suspects that this is because he must trust his many different attendants with his PIN and card to buy groceries and essentials, as during COVID, cash is no longer accepted.
  • Darren has been locked out of his account multiple times because, due to his cerebral palsy, he can’t enter the correct password in time.

Online Registration Accessibility

  • Lucy wishes to open an account with a pharmacy delivery service to get her medications delivered but can’t get past the CAPTCHA on the registration page because she can’t see.

Scams and Fraud Detection

  • Antonia has lost much of her life savings to a scam. She wasn’t able to detect the visual signals many people use to alert them to fraudulent claims.

Financial Record Monitoring

  • Jose was not able to monitor his VISA card records because they didn’t work with his alternative access system, as a result there were numerous invalid charges. He can’t contest them because it requires a phone call, and he is non-speaking.
  • Vanessa’s parents have left her investments to take care of her many essential needs since her car accident. The investment information is not in a format she can access, making it very difficult to monitor the status of the investment. She asked a neighbor to help. The neighbor made several bad choices that resulted in significant losses.

Disability and Financial Reporting

  • Rebecca is threatened with losing her disability pension because she can’t complete the financial reporting forms which are incompatible with her speech recognition system.
  • Silvia and her husband have been consistently denied loans or credit despite sufficient collateral because she has an unusual earnings history due to her episodic disability.

Tax Filing and Audits

  • Ana has been audited multiple times because her tax filing is flagged due to an unusual profile caused by her episodic disability, the audits always find her in full compliance.

Banking Accessibility

  • Ursula lives in a seniors housing complex. The only bank nearby is in a legacy bank building that is inaccessible to most of the residents of the complex because of the stairs. The bank has put a call bell outside to meet customers who can’t use the stairs. This doesn’t work very well for Ursula since she is losing her hearing and the traffic noise and wind makes it hard to hear outside. She has now heard that the bank is going to close the branch all together. This will leave most of her fellow residents without access to banking services. Most don’t have computers or smart phones.
  • Monica was hired by one of the five major banks to boost their diversity hiring. Because almost all of the financial applications she needed to use were inaccessible, she feels she was set up for failure. She could not perform her job, but rather than attribute it to the inaccessible tools she was given, it was attributed to her and she was let go.

Financial Literacy Training

  • Ruth wanted to enroll her son in a financial literacy training program before he moved out to live independently. He is reliant on captioning or sign language interpretation. She could not find any financial literacy training that offered these accessibility services.

Business Tools and Accessibility

  • Minesha is the owner of a small business. The budgeting, payroll and other financial tools she needs to run her business are all incompatible with the screen magnification and screen reading systems she relies on since her recent vision loss. She fears that she must close her business of more than 40 years, not because it isn’t successful but because the tools she needs exclude people with disabilities.