Online shopping can be a challenging experience for people with blindness or low vision. Very few ecommerce stores are truly accessible and inadequate product descriptions are everywhere, leaving most people confused about whether they’re buying a plain red jumper, or a red Christmas jumper. While we can’t fix every website, we can do our best to understand the problem, so businesses are motivated to do better and stop leaving over 500,000 Aussie consumers with low vision or blindness in the dark.

That’s why our team popped up in Paddington with clothing partner UTURN from Thursday 28 to Saturday 30 November in 2024 to offer customers a unique shopping experience, Blackout Friday. We created a store that wouldn’t let you see what you were buying, to raise awareness about what online shopping can be like for a person with low vision or blindness.

Customers could only choose items based on limited product descriptions that ranged from “white top” to “patterned dress”. Once they made their selection, they were handed a black satchel that contained the item. Their reactions ranged from, “not what I was expecting” to, “pleasantly surprised”.

We caught some of these reactions on camera and when we asked customers if they would be happy if they actually paid for these items, most of their answers were a definite, “no” and some were a less sure, “maybe”. Everyone’s conclusions were the same though; customers realised that more needs to be done to improve the online accessibility of e-commerce platforms.