Cognitive Accessibility of Digital Payments: A Literature Review
Jiamin Dai, John Miedema, Sebastian Hernandez, Alexandra Sutton-Lalani, Karyn Moffatt · 2023 · Proceedings of the 20th International Web for All Conference (W4A '23) · doi:10.1145/3587281.3587294
Summary
This literature review examines 30 scholarly publications (2012-2022) to characterize the cognitive accessibility challenges and design strategies for digital payments, focusing on the experiences of older adults and people with neurodiverse needs including dementia, intellectual disabilities, autism, dyslexia, and mental health conditions. The review was conducted collaboratively between McGill University and the Bank of Canada, motivated by the potential introduction of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and the need to ensure universal access to digital financial services. The authors frame universal access across three dimensions: financial inclusion (access to banking services regardless of income or trust barriers), digital inclusion (access to devices and networks), and accessibility (sensory, motor, and cognitive accommodation). Sources were gathered from ACM Digital Library and Scopus, with qualitative content analysis using a deductive approach guided by two broad concepts: problems and solutions. Findings are organized into banking and finance challenges (technology use patterns, accessibility violations, social challenges) and design and support strategies (simplified interfaces, awareness-raising, third-party support, new technological aids).
Key findings
The review reveals that WCAG A and AA violations are common across major bank websites, with the top five issues being poor contrast ratio, inability to resize text, invalid HTML, inability to bypass repeated content, and missing text alternatives. People with cognitive disabilities struggle with long sentences, finding specific interface elements, and understanding financial terminology. People with mild to moderate dementia experience high stress with voice-based banking systems due to changes in speech patterns, and mobile banking interfaces elicit distrust through pop-ups and unfamiliar information. Older adults with low technology literacy find voice assistants helpful for local information but question their credibility. Social challenges include the tension between needing third-party help with finances and the privacy and security risks of sharing credentials. Design strategies include simplifying interfaces with diversified cues (visual elements, images of bills and coins, single-task-at-a-time workflows), raising designer awareness through participatory involvement of people with cognitive disabilities, extending third-party support through caregiver-aware features like transaction pause-for-approval and trusted-party notifications, and leveraging AI for NLP-based synonym suggestions, simplified text generation, and conversational interfaces with meaningful representations.
Relevance
This review is timely given the global push toward digital currencies and the accelerating decline of cash use. It highlights a significant gap: cognitive accessibility is both critical to digital payments and severely under-researched compared to sensory and motor accessibility. The Bank of Canada partnership grounds the work in real policy implications — as central banks consider CBDCs, ensuring cognitive accessibility from the design stage is essential to avoid creating new forms of financial exclusion. The review's four implications for digital currency design are particularly valuable: promoting user agency through collaborative payments (where trusted others can assist without full account control), contextualizing inclusive approaches beyond plain language alone, and expanding AI-powered accessible design. A key limitation acknowledged by the authors is the exploratory nature of the review — future work will expand to a systematic review with meta-analysis. The finding that plain language alone is insufficient for cognitive accessibility across different user groups challenges a common assumption in accessible design practice.
Tags: cognitive accessibility · financial technology · digital payments · banking accessibility · older adults · neurodiversity · dementia · intellectual disability · mental health · digital inclusion · CBDC · literature review · cryptocurrency accessibility
Standards referenced: WCAG 2.0