Apple Pay, MasterCard, and Accessibility

Today in my new media class, we discussed Apple’s media event that happened yesterday. There was nothing particularly earth-shattering, mostly just the releases of new iPads and Macs. But there was one thing that was exciting. Apple announced that their new mobile payment service, Apple Pay, will be released to the public on Monday.¶ I have been looking forward to the release of Apple Pay, ever since it was announced at the last media event. Because it will be built in to iOS, it will probably work very well with VoiceOver, the screen-reading software that comes with all Apple products. Maybe there will be bugs in the beginning, but it will improve over time, just as iOS and Mac accessibility have improved over time.¶ Besides the almost guaranteed accessibility, since this process uses the phone, I assume I will be able to get electronic copies of receipts. I used to use Square because of this. I could pay with my phone, and I would get a notification with the receipt. I could unlock my phone and read the receipt fairly easily. If Apple Pay offers an option similar to Square, that will make my life easier.¶ Apple isn’t the only company introducing a new payment method. MasterCard plans to roll out a credit card with a fingerprint sensor, similar to Apple’s Touch ID, that would be used to authorize transactions instead of manually entering a PIN. Click here for more about how this card works. Although this won’t be like Square or Apple Pay—it works like a regular credit card—it is still interesting. I have a Visa card, so I won’t be able to take advantage of this, but I will be able to use Apple Pay.¶ With these new payment methods, if they work the way they should, and if retailers find them worthy of support, I won’t have to deal with something that annoys me: Inaccessible keypads to enter my PIN. There are a few places where I have had to deal with this problem. I swipe my card, and the machine can tell it’s a debit card and asks for my PIN. However, the keypad is a touch screen, with no physical buttons. Thankfully, when these situations have come up, the cashier was able to choose credit instead of debit so that I didn’t have to give her my PIN number, which I don’t feel comfortable doing, not because I don’t trust the cashier, but because I don’t want someone to overhear me giving it to her. Maybe that’s why these touch screen keypads don’t talk? Even so, the companies that make these machines could probably very easily make them at least a little bit accessible and only make this feature available when a headset is plugged into it, like with ATMs. If these new payment methods become very popular and work like they should, that would be a good solution to this problem.