Accepting physical credit card payments, the accessible PayPal solution

For many small businesses, the inaccessibility of payment solutions have often posed barriers to accepting physical credit card payments. More recently, services such as Squared and PayPal have entered the arena with solutions that provide small businesses and individuals the ability to accept physical credit cards using a small device connected to an OS or Android device. Although ultra portable and ultra convenient, these solutions traditionally pose accessibility challenges as well, because the card reader devices connect via the headphone jack and this disables speech output which may be needed for accessibility.

Although I wasn’t able to make a great deal of headway with the Squared solution, I did have success with PayPal’s. In the following audio demonstration, I’ll show how PayPal’s solution works with VoiceOver and will describe how to overcome it’s accessibility challenges.