Designing for Accessibility: Berkeley students are reimagining fintech for the visually-impaired
At IBSI, we love it when Berkeley students combine their technical skills with entrepreneurial spirits to make the world better for all.
“It’s meaningful to design experiences that genuinely make life more independent and fairer for all people” – Sejin Kim and Jessie Deng
In an increasingly digital world, financial independence is often just a click away—unless the digital tools built to facilitate that independence aren’t built for you. For Sejin Kim and Jessie Deng (UC Berkeley MIMS ’26), the realization that digital banking services could create “disadvantage through structural inequalities” sparked a drive to change the status quo.
Their project – Improving Accessibility in Everyday Banking: Designing for Vision-Impaired Users – is supported by our Lab for Inclusive FinTech (LIFT) and aims to dismantle the barriers that blind and low-vision (BLV) users face in everyday banking, transforming a source of stress into an experience of trust and autonomy.
When inclusive services don’t include you
These usability gaps create more than just annoyance; they create risk and exclusion, eroding confidence and autonomy for this user group.
For the 7 million visually impaired individuals living in the US —a number expected to rise as the population ages—banking apps often present challenges and, in some cases, insurmountable hurdles. Through conversations with accessibility experts, including Lucy Greco, Sejin and Jessie gained critical insight into the experience of BLV individuals and digital banking services.
They identified pain points that many sighted users take for granted. Mobile check deposits, for instance, are heavily camera-dependent, sometimes lacking the audio guidance necessary for a blind user to align a check. Similarly, digital bank statements are distributed as unstructured PDFs that are unreadable by screen readers, leaving users unable to independently review their own transaction records.
These usability gaps create more than just annoyance; they create risk and exclusion, eroding confidence and autonomy for this user group.
Beyond compliance to universal design
Sejin and Jessie are not just looking to patch existing bugs; they aim to propose “inclusive solutions that could scale across fintech platforms“.
For them, this project is about addressing the tangible impacts of inadequate user design – something they are learning in their graduate courses and eager to apply in solutions that can have real impacts on people’s lives. “We became passionate about designing for real problems,” the team notes.
Under guidance from their professor John Chuang and professor Marti Hearst, their Capstone project focuses on redesigning two high-stakes workflows: financial insights and transactional operations. By employing “accessibility-first principles,” they intend to create reusable UX patterns and accessibility heuristics that extend beyond their specific use case.
Their goal: establish guidelines for multimodal feedback (audio, haptics) and confirmation flows that provide users with the trust and clarity they currently lack.
The IBSI contribution
Recognizing they possessed the design passion and skills but lacked expertise in other areas, Sejin and Jessie reached out to our LIFT team in Summer 2025.
This mentorship allowed them to refine their survey and interview protocols to ensure they were not only effective but ethical.
We provided multi-level support to the student team, including:
- Technical review and input into the Concept Note – We provided input on the initial drafts of their Concept Note and encouraged a proposal to LIFT.
- Financial support for the student innovation project – The team was awarded $2,000 USD to fund an expanded survey of BLV individuals to inform their problem diagnostic and prototype development.
- Support with understanding and navigating the Institutional Review Board (IRB) process – While daunting for some, we’ve been doing IRB protocols submissions for 20 years! We were happy to support the team as they developed their online protocol and navigated key study design questions. The IRB process, often viewed as a bureaucratic hurdle, proved to be a vital learning experience for the team. It nudged them to reflect on “how dangerous the privacy and financial risks for participants would be” and “how cautious we need to be when conducting research with them”. Our guidance moved them to refine their survey and interview protocols to ensure they were not only effective but ethical in their data collection efforts.
- Connect with experts in the fintech and accessibility spaces. We also encouraged Sejin and Jessie to reach out to broader accessibility groups for their study sample and have introduced them to local industry leaders who are interested in seeing their prototype in action. Both these help the team to “strengthen the logic” of their project.
Looking ahead
The team emphasizes that the barriers in banking affect everything from financial gaps to a person’s basic sense of agency. “It’s meaningful to design experiences that genuinely make life more independent and fairer for all people”.
And to do that well, the team will put LIFT resources to good use – launching a larger-scale survey of 100 BLV individuals to inform their work and applying that learning to their design. As they move toward prototyping and usability testing, their work promises to offer insights transferable to other complex sectors, such as healthcare and education.
To bring their solution design to life, the team has expanded to include graduate students from the I School, Devi Sivakumar, Sarah Algashgari, Michelle Lin, and Willie Macharia, whose skills and perspectives support ongoing development efforts.
Stay tuned for more updates as their work unfolds!
