When you can't see, and your banking app OTP is expiring

The visually impaired are getting left behind in the Smart Nation journey. It's important to include their needs in the digital drive.

- Aaron Ng Yi Kai

With a smartphone, most essential life activities, such as banking, transport, shopping and transacting with the Government, can all be performed digitally anywhere, anytime.

While Singapore has made impressive strides in becoming a highly digitalised nation, many individuals still struggle with basic tasks that most of us take for granted.

Those who often face significant challenges in this area – particularly with smartphones – are the blind and visually impaired.

Despite the inclusion of accessibility features in most smartphones, these phones are fundamentally designed for people without disabilities. They can also be too expensive for visually impaired people who find it hard to land a job.

A group of my students at the Singapore Institute of Technology found that these were among several obstacles visually impaired Singaporeans face in navigating our increasingly digital society. Their study involved in-depth interviews with 12 such Singaporeans ranging from 23 to 62 years of age.

As we aspire towards a people-centric, inclusive digital future, these are crucial areas to consider.

THE PROBLEM WITH ONE-TIME PASSWORDS One of the biggest obstacles the visually impaired face in accessing digital services is SMS one-time passwords (OTPs).

For security reasons, these passwords expire quickly, usually within a minute. For those of us with normal vision, that's plenty of time.

This is not so practical for those with severe visual impairment. They typically rely on screen readers to read out the SMS OTP.

The actual OTP code is often positioned near the end of the SMS, and by the time the screen reader reads out the OTP code, there's not much of the minute left.

The visually impaired require much more time to enter OTP codes on their mobile devices compared with people with conventional sight.