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Home Blog Where Consumer Electronics Fail Blind Customers
In recent years, blind and low-vision people in the US and UK alone have made more than 420,000 calls for help with technology and appliances using the Be My Eyes app.
Matthew Tudge
September 29, 2026
Behind every one of those calls is someone who just wanted to get on with their day, from setting up a new TV to working out why the washing machine is flashing at them. These moments cost brands everywhere.
Parks Associates, for example, found that 36% of people who returned a consumer electronics or smart home device blamed difficulty with setup, installation or use. Last year, they also found that in smart home devices alone, 52% of DIY users still reported setup or connectivity issues.
Those figures cover all customers. Blind and low-vision customers face an extra barrier at each of these moments, and most product and support teams have never mapped it.
Below, we break down the six moments where these barriers show up, what they cost, and how brands can start closing the gap.
Comparing features and models is difficult without accessible product information.
This could be specification tables that rely on visual layout or comparison tools that can’t be navigated with a screen reader. These make an ordinary purchasing decision harder than it should be and the cost here is harder to judge because it happens before the sale. In fact, research shows that around 86% of disabled consumers will pay more for a product from an accessible website rather than buy the same product for less from an inaccessible one.
Setup instructions and on-screen menus are often hard to follow for anyone. For blind and low-vision customers, if there’s no accessible version, setup becomes impossible without a support call, an engineer visit or asking someone for help. That frustration quickly turns into unnecessary returns.
It’s the highest-risk moment in the journey. Setup is one of the top reasons customers return products, and it’s also where blind customers are most likely to need help that a standard support desk can’t give.
Touchscreens, indicators and controls are often not screen reader-friendly. Unlike a website, these interfaces can’t be remediated with a simple code change – making the support layer around them even more important.
Diagnosing issues such as a blinking error code on a display or an on-screen diagnostic message can be incredibly challenging. Without visual feedback, that crucial information is completely inaccessible to the customer and invisible to the agent on the phone.
This is where most consumer electronics support calls stall. The customer can’t read the code and the agent can’t see it, which leads to either a technician visit or worse – no resolution at all.
Documentation is frequently not accessible or easy to interpret. Manuals are commonly distributed as untagged PDFs, scanned images of printed pages, or documents whose reading order makes no sense to a screen reader. A manual the customer can’t read moves the entire burden of explanation to your contact center.
Everyday interactions with devices can also require workarounds or assistance. Whether that’s something like changing a setting, running a cycle, or interpreting a notification. Each can each mean asking another person for help. While these don’t always generate a support call, they help determine whether the customer buys from you again.
Each of those six moments has the same escape: when the product can’t be used independently, the customer contacts your support team.
This gives contact center leaders a problem they didn’t create and often can’t see in the data. These interactions rarely get tagged as accessibility issues and instead get logged as setup queries, fault reports, or returns requests, which means the underlying cause never appears in reporting and is never prioritized.
It also creates a specific operational failure in that a voice-only support channel can resolve a question about a policy or a delivery date perfectly well but not a fundamentally visual problem.
The most visible cost is returns that never needed to happen.
No Fault Found (NFF) returns are estimated to cost the sector more than $17 billion in lost revenue every year, and a product sent back because setup was inaccessible means a full-price loss plus reverse logistics, refurbishment and restocking. Where the product stays, the cost moves into increased handling times, higher call volumes and engineer callouts.
For any business serving customers in the EU, there is also regulatory exposure. Annex I, Section III of the European Accessibility Act covers support services, including help desks, call centers and technical support.
Finally, there’s the hidden churn. Most customers who hit a barrier don’t complain. They stop buying from the brand and tell other people why, so the churn rarely shows up in your data.
First of all, make sure the foundations are in place. Your website, product pages and any comparison tools must work with a screen reader, and your manuals should be published as accessible, properly tagged documents rather than scanned PDFs. Then test it properly with people who actually use access technology.
The fastest way to close the gap for products already in people’s homes is to make your support fully accessible for blind and low-vision users and that’s what the Be My Eyes Customer Accessibility Suite is built for:
Service Directory: lists your accessible support inside the Be My Eyes app so customers find the right channel first time.
Service AI: reads labels, error codes, and screens, and answers routine questions instantly, 24/7, in any language, without requiring an agent.
Service Stream: lets agents turn an existing support call into live visual support for any customer through a secure link and the customer’s smartphone camera.
Service Connect: puts blind and low-vision customers through to your trained agents from the Be My Eyes app, so the agent can see exactly what the customer sees.
Brands like Sony are already doing this. After an extensive market evaluation, the Sony team chose to partner with Be My Eyes to provide accessible customer service via Service Directory and Service Connect. The initial implementation in Europe was so successful that it has now been expanded across North American contact centers, servicing seven languages and numerous product lines. Read the case study here.
If you’d like to do the same, then request a demo of our Customer Accessibility Suite today.
