"I Shake The Package To Check If It's Mine": A Study of Package Fetching Practices and Challenges of Blind and Low Vision People in China
This work addresses accessibility issues for the BLV community in China, focusing on a routine daily activity, and is incremental as it identifies specific problems without proposing new technological solutions.
The study investigated the accessibility challenges faced by blind and low vision (BLV) people in China when fetching packages, revealing difficulties in finding collection sites, localizing packages, and interacting with self-service pickup machines like KuaiDiGuis, based on interviews with 20 participants in a metropolitan area.
With about 230 million packages delivered per day in 2020, fetching packages has become a routine for many city dwellers in China. When fetching packages, people usually need to go to collection sites of their apartment complexes or a KuaiDiGui, an increasingly popular type of self-service package pickup machine. However, little is known whether such processes are accessible to blind and low vision (BLV) city dwellers. We interviewed BLV people (N=20) living in a large metropolitan area in China to understand their practices and challenges of fetching packages. Our findings show that participants encountered difficulties in finding the collection site and localizing and recognizing their packages. When fetching packages from KuaiDiGuis, they had difficulty in identifying the correct KuaiDiGui, interacting with its touch screen, navigating the complex on-screen workflow, and opening the target compartment. We discuss design considerations to make the package fetching process more accessible to the BLV community.