Advocacy as Access Work: How People with Visual Impairments Gain Access to Digital Banking in India
In this paper, we examined the impact of digital banking on people with visual impairments in India. In India, the adoption and use of digital banking services have witnessed exponential growth in India over the last few years. For instance, in 2022, India recorded 85.5 million digital payment transactions, which exceeded the combined total of transactions from the four leading countries and accounted for 46% of global transactions from across the world. This growth in digital banking has been enabled by the state’s push for a cashless economy and the widespread availability of technologies such as smartphones. For marginalized populations, digital banking is expected to be transformational and increase their participation in the formal economy while also allowing easy access to social benefits and government schemes.
In our paper, we examined the impact of digital banking on one marginalized group in India: people with visual impairments. We conducted interviews with 30 people with visual impairments from across India to understand how they used digital banking in their everyday lives including the benefits they derived from it and challenges they encountered while using them. Overall, we found that digital banking helped people with visual impairments overcome many existing barriers with physical banking services such as hard-to-navigate bank environments and paperwork.
Yet, accessing and using these digital banking services was far from straightforward for people with visual impairments. A majority of our participants described that banking officials often refused to authorize and grant access to digital banking because they saw people with visual impairments as incapable and illiterate. Bank officials believed that providing people with access to digital banking would increase the likelihood of fraudulent transactions and posed risks to the bank. These experiences were in stark contrast to bank officials’ estimation of risk in relation to non-disabled and literate people who were granted access to digital banking as a matter of course.
“After opening the account, when I asked the banking personnel to provide the ATM or internet banking, they denied me… they said that visually impaired people are not entitled to use these services.”
People with visual impairments did work to fight the discrimination they faced and obtain access to digital banking services. In this paper we focus on the five dimensions of this work, which we term as advocacy work. These dimensions include 1) demonstrating competence to bank officials, 2) creating awareness, 3) escalation, 4) gathering support, and 5) finding and seeking sighted help. For instance, demonstrating competence involved showing bank officials their skill and competence with technology. Often, this entailed people with visual impairments taking out their smartphones and showing bank officials how they used many applications on the phone in order to convince them to provide access to digital banking.
“[The] manager was a little hesitant that I will have a problem in operating the account. So I will be losing money and I will blame the bank.. I showed my mobile, I logged into another bank’s internet-banking app.. [I] showed her how I am checking the balance, how I’m doing the payment. Then she is interested [asking], ‘What is this phone? How are you operating it?’ I showed her. I explained everything. She’s impressed. Then she activated [digital banking] services for me.”
Likewise, escalation involved lodging complaints to relevant legal authorities and using social media to hold banks accountable. In most cases, this was a final step in people’s efforts to secure access to digital banking.
Advocacy is a key political tool used by people with disabilities to foster social change. For instance, collective advocacy was central to the introduction of the Americans with Disabilities Act, a landmark judgment guaranteeing the civil rights of people with disabilities in the United States. However, discussions on advocacy in CSCW research and beyond usually center collective efforts and social movements. In contrast, our research demonstrates how advocacy plays out even at an interpersonal and individual level. While advocacy work did help in bringing about change in digital banking, it did have social and personal costs. Advocacy work was draining for people with visual impairments, who were also perceived as difficult to interact with. Despite these costs, advocacy was very much an everyday reality that was necessitated by the harsh realities encountered by people in India.
