At a Parliamentary function hosted by the Minister for Culture and Heritage, Hon Chris Finlayson, on 11 July, we launched our “brief” on accessible banking.

We all know I think that nowadays you can’t do much in our society without a bank account. The days of being able to carry out all our transactions using hard cash are pretty much gone.

As blind and vision impaired people, we are unable to access the banking system with the same degree of independence, confidentiality and dignity afforded to our sighted counterparts. Divulging personal banking information to another party to execute transactions on our behalf compromises our rights, responsibilities and obligations to the bank, and exposes us to potential criminal behaviour.

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At a Parliamentary function hosted by the Minister for Culture and Heritage, Hon Chris Finlayson, on 11 July, we launched our “brief” on accessible banking.

We all know I think that nowadays you can’t do much in our society without a bank account. The days of being able to carry out all our transactions using hard cash are pretty much gone.

As blind and vision impaired people, we are unable to access the banking system with the same degree of independence, confidentiality and dignity afforded to our sighted counterparts. Divulging personal banking information to another party to execute transactions on our behalf compromises our rights, responsibilities and obligations to the bank, and exposes us to potential criminal behaviour.

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p>While the adoption of “Voluntary Guidelines to Assist Banks to Meet the Needs of Older and Disabled Customers”, by banks, goes some way towards addressing our concerns, we stil need banks to ensure they deliver all services in a manner that avoids discrimination against people with disabilities.

EFTPOS machines are now in almost all shops and are inherently part of the banking system. The various designs of EFTPOS machines can pose a range of accessibility barriers to blind and vision impaired people. A blind customer should be able to enter their PIN and choose an account without assistance. We are seeking the adoption of standards for EFTPOS handsets to ensure these can be readily and independently used by blind people.

Although credit cards provide a convenient means of accessing money and making purchases, there are often difficulties for blind people in identifying which way the card is to be inserted into slots. We urge New Zealand banks to adopt a newly developed international scheme that can allow a blind or vision impaired person to correctly identify which card is which and which way to orient it when inserting it into a machine.

Finally, advances in technology and the emergence of self-service kiosks have increased the convenience of banking, but have also increased the need for banks to make sure accessibility issues are considered, thus ensuring blind customers are not disadvantaged and that we can conduct our transactions safely and securely. In fact self-service kiosks are popping up nowadays in a wide variety of settings. We need Banks to ensure their self-service kiosks are accessible to blind customers.

The brief goes into further detail on the above issues. As our financial systems become more technology-based, society must take steps to ensure blind and vision impaired people are not shut out of the very systems we all depend on. So we need banks and other financial institutions to adopt standards that ensure any advances in technology benefit blind customers in the same way as our sighted peers.