This Week in A11Y: Are gift cards w/ Braille a good idea or required by law??

The firms that brought you website accessibility lawsuits have now moved into litigating over the lack of Braille on gift cards

Authors note: Because of Medium’s refusal to address its accessibility issues for both authors and readers, I’ve moved my last three years of blogs to Substack. Please sign up there for notices of all new articles. Also, I will be updating older articles (like this one) and the updates will only be published on Substack. Thank you for your continued readership and support.

Starbucks has Braille gift cards. I thought they were pretty dang cool when I saw them for the first time in 2016, and made it a point to get many, each filled with between $5 and $25 for “thank yous” and gift giving purposes. The count is probably close to 100 cards over three years. Hello, marketing opportunity anyone?

While cute and subtly making a point to sighted users that “not everyone can see”, and arguably useful to Braille users, they never caught on with other vendors. Gift cards are an enormous business, over $300 billion globally today, and estimated to reach half a trillion (with a T) in just a little over six years. Bottom line — gift cards end up in a lot of hands, and…