Bitcoin QT problems

Bitcoin may be touted as a global and accessible currency, but some of its users are being badly underserved.

Michael Staffen is a bitcoin user who is blind. He posted about his frustration with bitcoin wallets, which currently don’t offer any accessibility options to visually impaired people, on reddit:

“I am a fully blind person who uses a screen-reader and every bitcoin wallet I have downloaded is inaccessible to my screen-reader … This is making me very annoyed as I am a bitcoin supporter and I have acquired my own bitcoin, I just can’t goddamn use them without getting help from someone else.”

Staffen’s reddit post attracted nearly 200 comments and almost 1, 000 upvotes. The comments were largely positive, calling on wallet developers to provide accessibility features for blind bitcoin users.

A core developer working on Multibit, a popular open-source wallet, said he raised the issue with the Multibit developer community and had started beta testing for accessibility issues after seeing the post. He has also recruited Staffen as one of Multibit’s beta testers.

Wallet accessibility

CoinDesk contacted Staffen to get a walkthrough of his experience using a bitcoin wallet with a screenreader. A screenreader is a piece of software that reads out the entire contents of a computer display and allows a blind or partially sighted person to operate the device.

Most people want to make [bitcoin] accessible, they just haven’t considered it. That’s one of the problems around accessibility.

Staffen uses the market-leading third-party application JAWS. As he fired up his computer, JAWS called out his cursor’s location on the screen.

Staffen said he uses only a keyboard to navigate through his computer. The screenreader read out each menu so quickly that Staffen had to slow it down for us to follow.

Firstly, he chose to demonstrate his problems with the the Bitcoin-Qt wallet. When the application launched, Staffen showed that he could only access the main menu bar in the application.