Financial inclusion: PayU launches India’s first central bank-compliant accessible payments checkout for blind and visually impaired users

PayU, India’s leading diversified fintech platform, announced the launch of Accessible Payments Checkout, India’s first Reserve Bank of India (RBI)-compliant payment checkout designed for people who are blind or visually impaired. India has an estimated 12 million blind individuals, which is a substantial, underserved market that just got a direct path into the checkout flow.

With this launch, PayU becomes the first payment gateway in India to comply with the Reserve Bank of India’s October 2024 accessibility mandate (BIS IS 17802). The enhanced checkout introduces a range of features designed to improve discoverability, navigation, and interaction for users with visual and cognitive accessibility needs, making the online payment journey more seamless and intuitive.

The new PayU Accessibility Checkout includes four key features:

. Full-Screen-Reader Optimisation: PayU’s Accessibility Checkout is engineered to work seamlessly with screen readers, ensuring easy navigation of the entire payment journey for the visually impaired and blind without any sighted assistance. From choosing the payment method like Net banking, UPI, QR, NEFT, etc. to payment amount confirmation and transaction completion, every element on the checkout page is clearly and transparently announced via voice commands to the user, ensuring they know where exactly they are in their payment journey.

. Adaptive User Profiles: This feature allows users to customize their checkout environments–adjusting cursor size, button dimensions, and navigation aids to fit their requirements. Their preferences can be saved, switched between or reset at any point. The checkout adapts as the user wants, delivering complete control in the hands of the user.

. Visual Inclusivity Modes: To aid users with conditions such as low vision, colour blindness, or light sensitivity, a wide variety of visual modes are offered by PayU’s Accessibility Checkout. From high contrast to greyscale mode to colour inversion to saturation adjustment options, the checkout offers support to the visually impaired users who rely on colour and contrast adaptations to use digital platforms.

Text Resizing: The Accessibility Checkout supports text scaling of up to 200% of the standard size, without overlapping or hiding any content. This feature ensures all elements on the checkout is transparently seen and read by the users with visual impairments.

PayU’s Accessibility Checkout does not require merchants to change their existing integrations. Accessibility is embedded as a design feature allowing merchants using PayU to automatically offer a compliant and accessibility-first payments checkout experience to their customers with disabilities.

Marcel van Oost, the founder of Connecting the dots in FinTech, commented: „Honestly, it’s worth pausing on how overdue this is. Checkout flows have historically been a nightmare for screen readers: unlabeled buttons, inaccessible OTP fields, broken tab navigation. PayU built this from the ground up to work with assistive technologies, bringing a user group that’s been quietly excluded back into digital commerce.„

He continued: „The move also sets a new standard. RBI-compliant accessibility is now a bar others will have to clear.„

Credit photo: ELETimes.ai